Re: Romanization of Reduced Vowels

At 3:51 am +0100 8/12/98, Kristian Jensen wrote:
>Nik Taylor wrote:
......
>>Depends, are they phonemic?  In W., for instance, [@] is an
>>allophone of /a/, so it's simply written <a>.
>>
>Well, I was thinking along the lines of the epenthetic vowel that
>occurs between conjuncts in words of the Mon-Khmer type. That is, a
>major syllable is preceded by numerous minor syllables. Some of
>these minor syllable coallesce to form consonant clusters. For
>example:
>
>-> /s.r@j/ "female" - /s/ and /r/ would be separated by a voiceless
>[@].
>
>-> /m.daj/ "mother" - /m/ and /d/ would be separated by a voiced
>[@].
>
>-> /p.ram/ "five" - /p/ and /r/ forms a cluster without an
>epenthetic vowel.
>
>-> /m.w@y/ "one" - m and w is separated by a very short [U] if at
>all.
>
>-> /m.j@n/ "to have" - m and j is separated by a very short [I] if
>at all.
>
>As one can see vowel in minor syllables has several phonetic values
>depending on the environment: voiced and voiceless [@], zero, [U],
>or [I]. Should this vowel be represented in Roman orthography?
Depends whether you consider the vowel to have a phonemic status, i.e. is
zero a conditioned reflex of the shwa of these minor syllables or are these
'epenthetic vowels' more akin to the type of pronunciations one can come
across in certain varieties of English, e.g. ['fIl@m] 'film', [nk@'rEdIbl]
'incredible'?   I guess to some extent this is a matter a personal choice,
but from the examples given I'd probably not write the vowel.

>If
>so, should it be presented by one symbol or several symbols to
>reflect the pronounciation?
Certainly not from the examples given above.  The [U] and [I] in the above
examples are clearly colored by the following [w] and [j]; to use separate
symbols for conditionally colored epenthetic, anaptyctic and/or svarabhakti
vowels is both unnecessary and IMHO quite unadvisable.

>If not, how do I avoid ambiguity with
>syllable final clusters?
Ah, now that'll depend on knowing the phonotactics of your languages.  If
there is a problem, I see no objection to the use of a single symbol, say
{y}, to denote the epenthetic vowel of initial clusters, with 'zero' as an
allophone; but I'd strongly advise against the use of more than one symbol.

Ray.