Re: The Language Code (take 4)

Attention:

This is *not* the beginning of an English Pronunciation Thread. If you
insist on turning it into one, I cannot be held responsibile.

On Saturday, June 14, 2003, at 07:40  AM, And Rosta wrote:

> Dirk:
>>                 e       logical
>
> typo: should be 'engineered'(!)
Fixed it.

>> English: Tn Pt*p++24,9(c)v(c) Wntar-- Mi++f+dt2a3c2n2 Sf++bsvoargn
>> Lc++d+1000000+
>
> To get English down to 9 vowels requires a degree of ruthless parsimony
> that would be highly controversial. At a purely descriptive level
> (i.e. in the Code's spirit of providing a flavour of the language
> rather than an analysis of it), I would say English has 19-22 vowels
> (for my accent; 19 definites + 3 marginals). Student textbooks and
> modern British dictionaries would use 20. That figure of c.20 better
> reflects the typological eccentricity of the English vowel system
> & the fact that it is responsible for most dialectal variation.
20 vowels?! Are they all distinctive? I agree that 9 vowels is too few
(I don't remember where that came from), but I can only get 13,
including diphthongs (14 if I include [O], which I don't have
natively). Of course, my dialect is rhotic, and I don't treat coda-r as
forming a diphthong with a preceding vowel nucleus.

> I know you mean it only as a casual example of the use of the code,
> but it illustrates one of the problems of typological comparison --
> how surfacey are the descriptions of each language? (Too surfacey,
> and differences get overstated; not surfacey enough, and differences
> get understated.)
>
> --And.
>
> [to preempt someone asking what the vowels are, here they are:
> I e & V Q U i: u: A: O: aI OI eI aU @U I@ e@ 3:
> the 3 marginals: U@ i &:
For the sake of comparison, I have:

[I E & V A U i u aI OI eI aU oU]

Of course, the nucleus of words like 'bird' present a problem; if [r=]
is admitted as a vowel to accomodate these words (rather than a deeper
analysis of vowel + [r]), then there is no good reason not to include
[Ir, Er, Ar, Or] as diphthongs, and the number of distinctive vowels
goes up to 18 for me as well.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga
Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"I believe that phonology is superior to music. It is more variable and
its pecuniary possibilities are far greater." - Erik Satie

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