Re: USAGE: English vowel transcription [Re: Droppin' D's Revisited]

On Fri, 13 Oct 2000, Roger Mills wrote:

> Adrian Morgan wrote:
>
> >They are, however, the place to teach meanings of words. I know people
> >sometimes *use* long/short in that casual way, but I didn't know there
> >existed schools that actually *taught* them to do so!>
>
>         Well, it was not a totally conventional school-- run as an adjunct
> to teacher-training by a small local college, as I think I mentioned before.
> Whatever their system (or the system in general use 60 or so years ago) it
> seemed to work-- most of us learned to read and spell without major trauma.
I went to a regular public school in the 70's, and I got the "long" and
"short" terminology as well.  That wasn't what threw me, though.  The
thing that completely confused me in third grade phonetics was their
insistence that (IIRC) "father" and "ostrich" contained different vowels
in their first syllables.  It wasn't till years later that I found out the
problem was due to my location - the Pittsburgh dialect does not have that
distinction!

(Ob-conlang: my first conlang used a system of diacritics over vowels to
indicate a combination of stress and vowel quality.  Attached to both
English vowels and European vowels, I made it a mixture of the two
systems, which led to having five different kinds of "e", as well as four
different ways to write /e/.)

Amanda