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

On Wed, 11 Oct 2000, Irina Rempt wrote:

> On Wed, 11 Oct 2000, Adrian Morgan wrote:
>
> > It's true that /i/ tends to be thought of as 'short' while /I/
> > tends to be thought of as 'long'. This is because occurences of /I/ in
> > many dialects of English _are_ almost always longer than occurences of
> > /i/.
> >
> > bit  [bit]
> > beat [bI:t]
>
> Have I been misunderstanding it all that time?
Perhaps Adrian confused <i> with <I> ...

> I thought that it was [bIt] "bit" and [bi:t] "beat". To me, [bit]
> sounds like the Dutch _biet_ "beetroot", and [bI:t] almost as if it's
> spelt "bate".
There are two traditions for transcribing the distinction between
English "long" (or tense) and "short" (or lax) vowels. The first may
be termed "qualitative" and distinguishes tense and lax vowels based
on their phonetic quality. Hence, tense [i] and lax [I]. The second
tradition may be termed "quantitative". Quantitative systems
represent tense vowels by by adding an additional symbol to the
character used to represent lax vowels. This additional symbol may be
the length mark [i:], a copy of the vowel [ii], or a glide [ij/iy]. Of
course a hybrid system which distinguishes both quality and quantity
is possible (and which seems to be the one you use): lax [I], tense
[i:].

I lean towards a qualitative transcription, although I will often add
a glide to a non-low tense vowel if the context demands clarification
of weight/length properties.

        lax     tense
        [I]     [iy]
        [E]     [ey]
        [U]     [uw]
        [O]*    [ow]

*Doesn't actually occur in my dialect.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu