Re: Romanization of Reduced Vowels

At 01:49 10.12.1998 +0100, Kristian Jensen wrote:


>But there is only _one_ underlying minor vowel in Boreanesian - the
>/@/. The other realizations of this vowel ([I],[U], and zero) are
>allophones of the same vowel. That's why I have decided to symbolize
>this with the same letter all throughout. Yet, it still wouldn't
>cause any ambiguity to represent these allophones by different
>letters to better reflect the pronounciation. Its just that Raymond
>adviced using one letter. What's better, phonemic or phonetic
>transcription?
>
>Regards,
>-Kristian- 8-)
I don't know if it's force of habit ;), but I agree with Ray!  Maybe the
best symbol would be an apostrophe, unless the lang also has a glottal stop
('as 'everyone knows the 'apostrophe 'is sacred to the glottal stop! ;-)
FWIW some phonologists argue that the French _h aspir/e_ and _e muet_
represent the same phoneme with a single feature [glottal], which is
optionally realized as glottal stop or pause before vowels and as [@]
before a consonant or a pause, but usually is not realized at all except in
extra-careful speech.  A lang with [h] and [@] as non-syllabic and syllabic
allophones of a single phoneme seems a funny idea, BTW.

Indonesian normally writes /e/ and /@/ with the same letter {e}, in spite
of the fact that they are different phonemes, but in dictionaries and
foreign learners' textbooks /e/ is differentiated as {/e}.  Maybe you could
follow a similar road, with /a/ differentiated from [@] only in those cases
where ambiguity may arise.

/BP

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    <bpj@...>

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