Re: The Language Code (take 4)

DE = Dirk Elzinga

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

Well, it's hard to discuss the quantity - er, rather, the number
of English vowels without talking about vagaries of pronunciation. :)
But I agree, let's not go off on another "in MY idiolect. . ." tangent.

DE> To get English down to 9 vowels requires a degree of ruthless parsimony
DE> that would be highly controversial.

I tend to agree, but I just came across the same figure while
rereading Pinker's _Words_and_Rules_.  Pinker was discussing
one of the attempts at non-arbitrary nomenclature in which
each phoneme represents a step from the root to the branch
of a knoweldge representation tree, and said that requiring
consonant/vowel/consonant would limit every other slot to a
maximum of nine possible values.  So this is apparently not
a novel idea.

Does someone have the exact list that is supposed to comprise "all
nine" of English's vowels?  I can come up with a semireasonable
list by eliminating all diphthongs and identifying the schwa [@] with
short U [V], which are often the same in my idiolect:

1. bat                  /&/
2. bought, father       /A/
3. bet                  /E/
4. bit                  /I/
5. beet                 /i/
6. boat                 /o/
7. put                  /U/
8. boot                 /u/
9. but, begin           /@/

Then the vowel in "bait" would be a diphthong consisting of /E/ + /i/,
and if it's more like [e] than [E], that's just allophonic variance.
The vowel in "bite" is likewise /A/ + /i/.  The vowel in "boat" is
really a diphthong because it glides to /u/ at the end, but the initial
vowel of the pair doesn't otherwise occur in English, so it still has
to take up one of the nine slots.  Meanwhile, r-coloring, or even
the reduction of vowel + r to a vocalic r, heard in "heard", can be
regarded as a phonetic effect; vocalic r is, for instance, represented in
many dictionaries' pronunciation guides as schwa + r.

Thoughts on the list?

-Mark

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