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

On 12 Sep 02, at 1:35, Arthaey Angosii wrote:

> 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?
I learned it as: slashes for phonemes (sounds which (can) make a
difference in what a word means) while brackets are for phones
(different sounds, regardless of whether they can make a distinction).

Then there are various phonetic transcriptions, since you can be fairly
broad (glossing over minor differences) or narrow (marking every little
feature such as dentalness, aspiration, length, etc.) or anywhere in
between.

What comes most natural to me is a broad phonetic transcription; this
shows up especially in such things as the [i] sound at the end of words
such as "city", or before [N] (I think we had that discussion a while
ago); I'm not sure which phoneme is appropriate, but I think I can
identify the phone. Similarly with [V] vs [@], which are probably one
phoneme for me /@/ -- but I still prefer to use both symbols.

And on the subject of "mention" -- on listening to myself, I suppose
there *is* a [t] in the middle (probably from the [n] preceding it).
But that would make it ["mEntS@n] while remaining /"mEnS@n/, since the
[t] is pronounced but is not really (IMO) phonemically part of the
word, being conditioned by the environment rather than being a
separate, explicit feature of pronunciation.

Chers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <Philip.Newton@...>