Re: Pronunciation keys

Hm.  Laziness or a new phonemic analysis?  Maybe the theory is that if
any dialect can get away with not distinguishing them, they must not
be distinct phonemes. :)

Those all have the same vowel (modulo the rhoticity in "star") for me, btw.

On 1/30/07, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
> Quoting "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>:
>
> > As I said in my 2nd message, I have no complaint with the standard
> > symbols used in English dictionaries; they have a long history and are
> > widely recognized by the general educated public, who have no
> > familiarity with the IPA.
>
> It's however annoying to L2 speakers like me, who learnt English phone*ics
> with
> (slightly non-standard) IPA. I suppose we don't constitute enough of a
> market
> segment to warrant separate editions ...
>
> The worst confuzzlers I've run across are the McGraw-Hill technical
> dictionaries, at least those of which I have encountered uses a variant of
> the
> Oxford system with the added twist it merges a bunch of things that are
> distinctive in the variant I learnt. Most notably, perhaps, the vowels of
> "star", "caught", and "cot" all get transcribed as [ä] (that's a-umlaut in
> case
> it gets mangled).
>
>                                                  Andreas
>

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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