Re: YAEPT: apparently bizarre 'A's (was Re: YEAPT: f/T (was Re: Other Vulgar Lat

Sorry for the lack of quoted context; the Blackberry interface to
GMail has binary quoting (nothing or TOFU, w/no editing), and I
figured "nothing" was the lesser evil.

Anyway, I certainly didn't mean to imply that the common Ur-English
had historic reality as a spoken language.  It has only psychological
reality, in the present, in that we perceive ourselves to be speaking
variants of "the same language".  And indeed, I'm sure Tristan and I
could understand each other in person... if we talked slowly enough
:). So to the extent language identity is based on mutual
intelligibility, that perception is correct.

As to phonetic symbology, you're right that I overstated the
precision.  Each symbol covers a spectrum of similar sounds.  But the
difference between phonetics and phonemics is that in the latter case
the sounds represented by a single symbol are identified by their
equivalence within a given language, and need not even be phonetically
similar at all.

Finally: what's "Rann"?  The only Rann I know of is the adopted home
planet of comic book hero Adam Strange, which I presume is not what
you meant (and which I, for the record, pronounce exactly like the
word "ran").

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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