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

At least a partial comment---

Mark J. Reed wrote:

> I think y'all are talking past each other - and neither being particularly
> fair about it, IMESHO.
Agreed :-))
>
> Any 'lect, be it dia-, regio-, ideo-, or other, may certainly be subjected
> to independent phonemic analysis; indeed, you could say that those are the
> only things you *can* analyze directly.  As far as I can tell, Daniel was
> doing this for his 'lect, while Ray was arguing that Daniel's choice of
> symbols was inappropriate for a phonemic analysis of "English" the global
> language.  Since Daniel wasn't proposing a new phonemic analysis of the
> global language, I suppose they're both right.
Agreed.
>
> When I said that phoneme symbology is arbitary, I didn't mean to criticize
> Daniel's choices or trigger a defensive response.  I certainly agree that
> the choice is not *entirely* arbitrary...
_Theoretically_ one _could_ use arbitrary symbols, e.g. the vowel /#/; then
you'd need statements as it how it's realized phonetically: "/#/ is realized
as [...] in Dialect A, as [some variant of ...] in Dialect B, etc. etc."
(Even if you assign it a letter symbol, you need those statements anyway.)
Actually, in historical linguistics, this is often done (usu. using
numerals) in preliminary work, esp. with difficult or seemingly irregular
correspondences-- e.g. if you find a correspondence r::d::y::dZ::g::s you
might want to label it *1 or *# before you can determine what "letter" to
use to represent that correspondence, and where it fits in the whole system
(should it be a stop? rhotic? continuant/approximant? should it be alv.,
palatal, velar? etc.)

And IIRC, Chadwick and Ventris assigned numerals to the various Linear B
symbols, before deciding that they corresponded to letters/syllables  in
Greek.

> and the closer to phonetic reality the better...
Yes, since ultimately (in phonemics) we're dealing with known/audible
sounds.

> In general, while phonemic analysis identifies the phonemes, it can only
> hint at what actually distinguishes them.
Agreed.

> Likewise, the use of /a:/ and /a/ for the vowels of "part" and "pat" in
> Danglish does not introduce /:/ as a phoneme...
Well, it does do so, though strictly in terms of _his_ idio-/dialect; how
that relates to "Pan-English" is, I think, what's being argued.

> So, to sum up, if I may . . . I think we can all agree that (1) "pat" and
> "part" have two different vowels in most varieties of English, and (2) the
> traditional (diacrhonic, diaspatial :)) phonemic analysis of pan-global
> English represents the distinction as one of quality and rhoticity.
Rhoticity does seem to be the source of major problems........

>the thread can now descend into violent agreement. :)

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