Phonomic & Phonetic writing [was; pseudo welsh etc]

Barbara Babbled
> > I stand ready to be
> > corrected on this but although I've come accoss languages that
> > distinguish in minmal pairs /a/ and /@/ I've found not that pair /a/ and
> > /æ/ in this way - seems to be a matter of accent.
> Peter Penned
> Ok, but how does your pseudo Welsh system transliterate them?
Barbara Blithers;
First I've been corrected, and as I should have remembered from my
anglo-saxon runic studies <hits head with mallet for penance, Anglo
Saxon did differentiate between "a" and Ash.

But back to Peter's question; my pseudo welsh system doesn't. As they're
the same phoneme in the system there's no need too; although I should
have made this clear by noting a = /.ae ~ a/. Remember that
transcription systems are phonemic, not phonetic. (That difference
between phonetic and phonemic has been eloquently discussed in the (OFF
LIST) ASCII IPA thread).

If you wanted to use the system and be able to differentiate between
[.ae] and [a] then then you could use the letter Ash or an ae digraph to
do so.

Back to phonemic vs phonetic;
English spelling for example makes no allowance for the three "a" sounds
that are used in various accents or between dark and light "l" even
though most accents use both sounds. The reason is because there are no
words that uses these sounds as minimal pairs so they're the same
phoneme and can be represented by single letters, so /a/ = [.ae]~[a]~[@]
and /l/ = [l]~[.~l].
likewise when /.tS/ /.dZ/ /S/ or /Z/ precede a vowel they're always
palletized (eg [S^j]) but not palletized if final or precede a consonant
stop (eg [S]) so although english uses 8 different sounds here they may
be represented by only 3 letters/digraphs; ch, j, sh (there's no
consistent spelling of /Z/ in english). One of english's oddities is
that [D] and [T] do form minimal pairs, but as these are rare, they're
both represented by the digraph "th" (I know of accents where [T] and
[D] are said as [t_[ ] and  [d_[ ] or as [f:] and [v:] so that's SIX
sounds to one digraph!). Personally I'm aware that I vary my
pronunciation; "Past" for example if I'm being precise of formal is
[p@:st] if I'm casual or lazy it's [p.aest] and if I'm rushed it's
[past] but phonemically they're all /past/.

For another more extreme example; At this moment, for an SF tale, I'm
trying to develop a trade talk (pidgin). The various species articulate
sounds in different ways. One has a split upper lip, one has prehensile
lips, and another two have ridged lips, and one of these has no
vibratory articulation so all sounds are unvoiced (like whispering); so
the sounds of the other species language are not possible for each
other. But they all have bi-labials so BL/V3 is one syllable in the
trade language even though the BL can be any bilabial or labio dental -
that's 15 distinct sounds in the IPA but only one phoneme and thus only
one letter, (and the letters are syllabic like Katakana; the vowels have
a range too which is why the notation is V3 rather than a specific
vowel); the humans say [p^ha:], the Raowl (cat like) say [.|B@:] and the
Shshiche and Theet (reptilians both) say [m^h.ae:] and [.|o.OE:]
respectively, but in writing as they're the same phoneme-pair it's all
written as the same syllabic letter ; BL/V3

I think that one of the ways one *might* spot a constructed language is
finding 2 or more letters (phonetically distinct) that are the same
phoneme and could have been represented by a single letter. Why do I
think this? Well my experience of linguists is that they are tempted to
accurately reproduce the *exact* sounds of their language and create
transliteration rather than transcription systems for their writing
systems, whereas real life writing systems differentiate between
phonemes and are never phonetically exact; always transcription never
transliteration. But a linguist who's studied writing systems as a
subject in itself, or has done field work noting down obscure languages
(a discipline where phonetic transliteration must eventually be rendered
as phonemic transcription), however would not make this error.
Forewarned is forearmed so be careful folks.

Barbara

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