Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

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

From:Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Date:Saturday, June 30, 2001, 5:19
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. ;-)