Re: Pronunciation keys

I always wanted a dictionary with a diaphonic transcription,
essentially rhotic but with all Wells' lexical sets for
vowels distinguished, not least since that IMO would be a
Good Thing for English the IAL. Otherwise you can't very
well blame American dictionaries for giving an American
pronunciation or British dictionaries for giving a British
pronunciation -- but hey, how neutral is really RP these
days, or General American in the deep South? Thus a
diaphonic transcription, or several transcriptions where
exixting pronunciations are not reducible to a single
abstract phonology is desirable even for L1 speakers.

BTW  _ä_ (LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS) for
COT-FATHER-START-CAUGHT is of course absurd, since most
languages which use ä in their orthography use it for
someting in the range of [&]-[E].

<rant>
I took a lot of flak in the RP-normative Swedish school
system because of the American accent I learnt from my
grandmother. There is every reason for an L2 learner to be
able to mentally translate between, if not actually master,
several kinds of English, and be less rigid about "the
variety *I* learnt". Indeed what English the IAL needs is
more relaxation WRT native norms of pronunciation and
grammar. In fact somebody who says [& lQt smArt@r] will be
readily understood by a larger segment of the worldwide L1
community than someone using any of the two most proffered
native models.

FYI I use LOT-THOUGHT-FATHER merger, as well as FOOT-GOOSE
merger when speaking English for the simple reason that all
my L1 has available in the back part of the vowel space is
someting that varies between [A] and [Q], an /o/ and an /u/,
and whenever I'm tired I will inevitably, as most people,
fall back on my L1 phonology. My [o] or even [O] is way too
high for a British LOT, and my [kot] is much more likely to
sound like _coat_ even to a Brit or Aussie who has that item
as [kVu\t] in their own speech, since all L1 speakers have
watched American movies, dammit! This is not to say that I
can't make all the distinctions for clarity if needed -- I
even deliberately use my L1 [u\:] for GOOSE for extra
clarity! -- but the point is that the mergers I do in my
casual speech are such that are found within the range of
more widely known native pronunciation types (OK FOOT-GOOSE
merger isn't that common, but the functional load on that
distinction is minimal for those that have anything central
unrounded for STRUT -- which I, oh horror, normally render
as [3\]! :-)
</rant>

/BP

Mark J. Reed skrev:
 > 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
 >>
 >
 >

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