Re: USAGE: 2nd pers. pron. for God

Quoting Arthaey Angosii <arthaey@...>:

> Emaelivpahr Philip Newton:
> >*Strictly* speaking, I think that I do, too -- /d@st/ but [dVst]. Since
> >slashes mark phonemes, and someone convinced me that [V] and [@] are
> >allophones of the same phoneme /@/; the stress or not of the syllable
> >determines the realisation.
>
> What do the brackets mean, then, if slashes are for phonemes?
Brackets are the pure phonetic transcription of the elicitation;
solidi (bzw. slashes) refer to the _distribution_ of sounds in a
language (the phonology). So, for example, in American English,
[t], [t_h], [t.], [t._h], [t[], and [r"] are all possible ways
of transcribing a "t"-sound, but because American English speakers
"hear" them all as the same sound, they are phonemically transcribed
as /t/.

> >Cheers /tSI@z/, <-- not rhotic
>
> I read (somewhere) that rhoticity is relatively rare (do I get points for
> the R's that unintentionally went into that sentence? <grin>). However, I
> couldn't find an actual statistic anywhere. Does someone have a number?
Where'd you read that? Over half of the world's native
English speakers speak a rhotic dialect.  (Most of the
world's L2 speakers, however, speak a nonrhotic dialect.)

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637