USAGE: English vowel transcription [Re: Droppin' D'sRevisited]

Roger Mills wrote:
> but of course [æ], [I], [a] are now totally unrelated phonetically
> to [eI], [aI] and [oU] etc.
I don't know if it was because of the spelling, but /E/ and /i/, /I/ and
/aj/, etc., always felt intuitively connected.  In fact, it took me some
time to get used to the idea of /I/ being closer to /i/, and /E/ to
/ej/.  It may have been due to spelling, but it may also have been due
to the number of alternations within the language, such as
/sejn/-/s&nIti/, or irregular past tenses like /bajt/-/bIt/,
/rajt/-/rItIn/, etc.