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

----- Original Message -----
From: John Vertical <johnvertical@...>
> if analyzing English as a whole, shouldn't you also set up
> separate phonemes such as the vowel in BATH, which, while they
> aren't
> independant phonemes (from TRAP or FATHER in this case) within any
> dialect,
> still behave distinctivly when considering all of them?
This brings us neatly back to the question of metaphonemic
representations in dictionaries. See those
recent threads for the gory details. Likewise, spelling reform is
hinted at.

> So this rephrases the original question to: can anyone think of an
> English
> phrase with all of the "lexical sets" represented? We can agree on
> how many of them there are, can we?
My formal lect has (I think) 15 phonemic vowels, and other lects
clearly have different mergers and
splits.

For the record:

HEED, HID, HEAD, HAIRED, HAD, WHO'D, HOOD, HUD, HOARD, HOD, HARD,
HUED, HEYED, HIDE, HOED

Something like: /i, I, e, E, a, u, U, V, O, Q, A, ju, Ej, Vj, ow/ plus
/@/ that I can't find a /h...d/
frame for.

Also, HOLD might be on the list, but I can't figure out exactly what
it is. Maybe /h@wd/ or something?

On top of that, I have reduced vowels and vowels that might or might
not be allophones in my
colloquial lect (/i\/ and /6/ among their number, as well as syllabic
fricatives and liquids), and a
whole different set in my "trying to be understood by Americans" lect,
which for a start is rhotic,
among other foul abberations.

Consonants, of course, add greatly to the available sources of lexical
sets, even among native
speakers.

I think the best place for enumerating everyone's lexical sets might
be the Conlang Wiki. There's a
canonical list of vowel archiphonemes in English somwhere, and I think
adding rows representative of
each lect on the list (or as many as possible), breaking and merging
columns based on the "neutral
ground" could work quite well.

The same might be able to work for isoglosses and alloglosses, too,
but that's a project for another
day.




Paul

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