Re: USAGE: ei and ej (was: Front vowel tensing)

Tristan McLeay wrote:
>> Yes:  /ej/ is one syllable, /ei/ would be two-- _phonemically_ speaking.
>> Compare /najf/ 'knife' vs. /naijv/ 'naïve'.  Or maybe /pej/ 'pay' vs.
/peIN/
>> 'paying'-- but we Americans would write the latter as /pejIN/ I think.
>> British tradition would have /pe:/,  I'm not sure what they'd do with
>> 'paying'.  /pe:IN/??
>
>
>Anything to do with australian or british phonemics i've seen uses /ai/
>as a single syllable. /naif/ vs /naiji:v/ is what i have, /p&i/ vs
/p&ijIN/.
>And, IME (experience), the brits use /eI/ for 'pay', unless they are
>northern and use [e:].
>And so its /peI/ vs /peIIN/, I think.>
That seems reasonable.  I haven't read much in the British literature on
phonemics (i.e. from the classical, pre-generative era).  Actually, my
/naijv/ would reflect a very careful pronunciation; most people including me
would diphthongize the [a] in ordinary speech, so [naji:v], perhaps would
have been written phonemically /najijv/.  (But anyhow, it's one of those
damn furrin words that screw up English phonology.....;-)  ).
>
>> Even in US phonemics, there were competing ways of representing the
offglide
>> or neutralization of vowels before /r/-- /fihr/ 'fear' springs to mind.
(If
>> your dialect was truly r-less, you could simply write /fih/, contrasting
>> with /fij/ 'fee'
>
>And, in my aah-less dialect, its /fI@/ (and /fI:/ for some others) vs /fi:/
>
>Does anyone really have a /h/ there, or did they just say 'what the hell,
lets
>
>shove a <h> in there for the fun of it'?>
No, nobody has an "h" there.  It's just a symbol to represent the
centralized off-glide before [r].  And it never really caught on; most
linguists just omitted it  or wrote a schwa.

Bear in mind that a lot of American linguistic work in "phonemics" was done
in the 30s, 40s, 50s, and that classical approach, I suspect, is no longer
fashionable, perhaps not even taught anymore except as a useful stepping
stone to the more powerful theories have arisen since Chomsky & Co.
revolutionized the field.
(And a purely technical problem linguists faced in those days was, how to
write about  English phonology using just the resources of the standard
typewriter keyboard-- not unlike the our problems with the computer
keyboard/email.  For aesthetic reasons, I guess, we avoided mixing upper and
lower case, but also didn't want to have to insert characters by hand.  One
did have to add carons to "s, c" for {sh, ch}.  And it was a chore to leave
a blank space, then write in a proper schwa afterwards-- lots of
proofreading errors-- so many linguists took to using barred-i instead, even
though it was phonetically inaccurate.  But the system served as a standard,
and with enough qualifying statements, worked pretty well for the
description of _most_ US  speech.)  End of ancient history lesson. ;-)