Re: more English orthography

Steg Belsky wrote:
>In my pronounciation (NYC) "merry, marry, Mary" are pronounced
>approximately as /mEri/, /m&ri/, /me@ri/.  My American English problem
>with IPA is that my linguistics teacher and books always talked about the
>phoneme /A/ (back low unrounded), which doesn't exist in my dialect.  I
>use /a/.>

A good example of how some of the matters we've been discussing vary not
only by general _dialect areas_ but even, within those, _individually_.

I have no /A/; I have /a/.  But "merry, marry, Mary" are all the same--
/'meri/ with the _e_ midway between [e] and [E]; and I ain't no Noo Yorker.
Similar neutralization before /r/ seems to be characteristic of most General
Midwestern speech, maybe all American except Southern(?).  Sear/sere--
neither [i] nor [I], more neither [o] nor [O]-- the IPA I learned
represented this vowel as "backward c with a heavy dot on the upper left
end".  In the olden days, when Phonemics ruled, it was always a problem how
to represent these, since Neutralization was a no-no.  /siyr/ or /sir/?
/mowr/ or /mor/?  (The latter, arbitrarily-- to be distinguised from /siy@r/
'seer' and /mow@r/ 'mower', which of course are derivatives anyway.
Actually, since you used /sir/ for 'sere', you could use /siyr/ for 'seer'--
the /r/ in that case being syllabic by definition or position.  But........)

I also distinguish cot [cat] and caught [cOt] etc.  Lots of people
(Californians in particular) do not.

Occasionally I do have/A/ in just two words:  water, and rather.  _Water_
was changed because my Midwestern (probably nasalized, too) ['wa:t@r] was
just too much for my (upper class, Eastern) boarding-school-mates and was
the object of much derision (along with my general 14-year-old  nerdiness).
_Rather_ seems to have (been?) changed as a general result of 12 years
residence in Eastern US/Boston/New York, plus a certain tinge of
Anglophilia, and a desire not to be hopelessly marked as a Middle Westerner.
30 years in Michigan have eroded a lot of that.

Upshot of all this:  Orthographic reform?  "Lasciate ogni speranza.......