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

On 24/02/06, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:

(Mark, you seem to be having Reply-To issues too. Maybe it's not me,
but it's Gmail that's a bit iffy on the matter still? Sorry about the
second copy of this.)

> 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.
I doubt it has any real psychological reality; from a phonetic level I
think it's translated straight to your own word for it, without any
"foreign phonemic translation". Thus, there's no need for "foreign
phonemic systems", which is what your proposal amounts to as far as I
can see it.

I mean, if I hear an American singing a song and they rhyme two words
that don't rhyme for me, it'll sound like it doesn't rhyme, or at best
like a bad rhyme. When I hear an American speak, as long as I haven't
misheard them, it gets translated to Australian English phonemes at a
pretty-low level of processing. (e.g. i very quickly forget, and often
never know, whether a particular pronunciation was rhotic or not. tho
that particular problem also occurs when hearing words in foreign
languages)

...

> 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").
Who, rather. Mike Rann is the current Premier of South Australia. (A
former Premier of New South Wales had the surname "Wran", which is
more commonly used in examples of /& &:/ minimal pairs and pronounced
the same.) I would pronounce Rann as the name of a planet the same as
I'd pronounced Rann the surname, as /r&:n/ and differently from "ran"
as /r&n/.

--
Tristan.