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

On 05/02/07, Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:
> 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:
Is length the predictable element, or is it the rounding of [Q], as in
Hungarian?

...
> 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".
If the differences aren't great enough to consider English English and
American English as "different", then there's no way you could
consider Australian English "different" alone. AusE is still little
more than an isolated variant of S. E. British English. There's
various phonetic differences, which have various implications for how
sounds are interpreted, but a short i is a short i is a short i...

(But, aside from when discussing relationships between English
dialects, I don't think this is a useful extent to go to. I would stop
when you found what features were psychologically real, and in that
case /:/ is clearly an aspect of AusE, clearly not in AmE, and clearly
unclear in BrE.)

--
Tristan.

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