Re: Schwa and [V]: Learning the IPA

On 16/06/06, Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...> wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Jun 2006 21:02:06 -0400, Tristan Alexander McLeay
> <conlang@...> wrote:
>
> >> >
> >> > Really, even when short?
> >>
> >> Yes - length is not phonemic in this neck of the woods.
> >
> > I was of the impression that length and quality were concomitantly
> > phonemic (I think that means what I want it to mean) ... but would you
> > take [I:] as long as /i:/, or [i] as short as /I/ to be nothing more
> > than, respectively /I/ and /i:/?
>
> I have always held (well, not always, but it is my most recent position,
> and relatively long-lived as such things go) that length is not phonemic
> in my lect.
You'll have to remind me of where you come from/what dialect you speak
(Earthlink's an American ISP, yes?). It's well known that length is
completely allophonic and does not correspond to tension in some
English dialects, like various American ones and Scottish English.
(This makes it harder for me to understand! The exaggeratedly
different /I/ these dialects use sounds more like /@/ or /e/ to me,
whereas the short /i/ sounds like /I/.)

On the other hand, most descriptions of RP have length corresponding
to tense vowels (with some allophonic shortening/lengthening occuring
in certain contexts, but affecting long and short vowels comparably).
Indeed, the earliest analyses & IPA transcriptions of RP used /i:/
versus /i/ for what is now commonly /i:/ versus /I/ (a transcription
that is ambivalent to the primacy of quantity or quality). It was in
RP, or something very much like it, that I was talking about.


>Quality alone suffices, and it "feels" like my canonically
> long vowels aren't much if any longer than the short ones. Well, the other
> day I accidentally found a minimal pair for length, I think: A /pE`/ is
> two of something and a /pE:`/ *** is a fruit like an apple, unless I'm
> mishearing myself.
I woludn't be surprised if you were thinking to hard. I sometimes
convince myself I have a distinction between [De]="there" and
[De:]="their, they're", but I don't really. I think if you've got a
case like that it's better to look at what other people have... BTW,
what's the /`/ meant to represent? It's usually a diacritic for
retroflexion/rhoticity, but you've got it after the colon in /E:/
making it look like some sort of separate segment?

>I think there *might* be a triplet /I/ ~ /i/ ~ /i:/ but
> I'll have to get back to you on that one once I figure it out. There's
> |ick!|, |eke| and |eek!| I suppose, but do interjections really count? I'm
> not given to saying "eek!" much, anyway. I think it's only part of my
> lexicon by association.
:) I imagine if you did say it it'd be more like [i::::k] anyway, so I
reckon probably it doesn't count :)

> *** Note that the rhoticity is only realized before vowels, as /r\/, and
> is normally mute.
Completely mute? Such that for you, a pair like "faired" and "fed" are
homophones? (For me: [fe:d] and [fed].)

BTW: Can you tell me, is the Reply-To header on my emails currently
being set appropriately? I think GMail's agreed to behave well, but I
could be wrong.

--
Tristan.

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