Re: Phonological equivalent of "The quick brown fox..."

Henrik Theiling wrote:
>
> R A Brown writes:
(Danl.Prohaska:)
> > > But vocalic length itself is distinguished in EE, e.g. between /E/
> > > and /E:/ in /bEd/ <bed> vs. /bE:d/ <bared>
> >
> > I think not - there's certainly a _qualitative_ difference in the way
> > I say it (and I speak a normal non-rhotic SE England variety). In any
> > case, to give [:] phonemic status because of this pair only seems weak
> > to me.
> >...
(HT:)
> But does it matter?  I mean, the phonemic symbols used are simply
> that: symbols -- if some vowel is long phonetically, why not use a /:/
> in the symbol to denote the corresponding vowel phoneme?  This does
> not mean that length itself is phonemic, does it?  If there is [A:]
> and [Q], but neither [Q:] nor [A], why not still use /A:/ and /Q/ for
> these vowel phonemes?
>
Ockham's razor is one reason. Plus one of the axioms of phonemics: if a
feature is entirely predictable, it is not phonemic and need not be
represented. That's why e.g. aspiration is not indicated in Engl. phonemics,
nor vowel length before voiced sounds, etc. As Ray continued:

"But
I am not over fond of such analyses either as it means that we posit one
set of phonemes for non-rhotic varieties and a different set of phonemes
for English speakers in south-west England and among the rural dialects
of the Midlands and several parts of southern England with r-colored/
rhotic vowels (i.e. /bE`d/ or /be`d/. It also means that we have to have
yet a *third* set of phonemes for those speakers in much of Wales and in
the Scottish Highlands who actually have a apically trilled consonant in
_bared_, i.e. /berd/.

As all these dialect variants are _predictable_, it does not seem to me
sensible to be setting three different _phonemic_ realizations of the
|r| in _bared_ - indeed, unless I have completely misunderstood the
phonemic theory, I would have thought it was wrong to do so."

Most dialects of US/Canadian (and I think UK) English can be represented
with the same phonemic system, and departures from "the standard" can be
handled with various adjustment rules (e.g. loss of post-voc. /r/, different
realizations of the vowels/diphthongs /ow/ or /ay/, etc.). It can get messy,
but it works :-)))

It's possible that there could be dialects of English (or any language) that
diverge significantly from what could be called "the standard", in which
case they might require a different phonemicization. Australian Engl. _may_
be such a case, though I'm not totally convinced....  If the divergences
increase past a certain point (difficult to define), then we're dealing with
a related "language" not a "dialect".

Replies