Re: YAEPT: apparently bizarre 'A's (was Re: YEAPT: f/T (was Re: Other Vulgar Lat
| From: | Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, February 23, 2006, 14:18 |
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On 2/22/06, John Vertical <johnvertical@...> wrote:
> Okay, another bug fix - [ ] are phonetical brackets. For representing
> written letters, <r> or |r| is used. (I'm not sure what the exact difference
> between _those_ is, but I use mostly the angulars - they're more legible.)
There is no difference, but the angle brackets historically confused
some mail readers, which interpreted them as HTML tags. So we adopted
the vertical bars on this list to avoid that problem.
> I agree that it's safe to say that /r/ is a semi-vowel corresponding with
> /3/.
Nope. First of all, /r/ can mean too many things, so let's stick to
phonetics. The sound [r] isn't a semivowel - although as a trill, I
suppose [r] can be syllabic (anyone know of any examples of
that?). The approximant [r\] is a semivowel, but the corresponding
full vowel isn't [3], it's [r\=].
There seems to be a fundamental shared confusion here - no doubt the
result of learning this stuff over a textual rather than audible
medium. So please pardon me while I momentarily lapse into caps for
emphasis:
THE VOWEL [3] HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH RHOTICS.
The only association is by proximity: the sound [3] is the historical
outcome, in many English dialects, of a reduced vowel when that vowel
is followed by an <r> - whether or not the <r> itself is maintained
phonetically.
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