USAGE: English vowel transcription

Nik Taylor wrote:

>Roger Mills wrote:
>> but of course [æ], [I], [a] are now totally unrelated phonetically
>> to [eI], [aI] and [oU] etc.
>
>I don't know if it was because of the spelling, but /E/ and /i/, /I/ and
>/aj/, etc., always felt intuitively connected.  In fact, it took me some
>time to get used to the idea of /I/ being closer to /i/, and /E/ to
>/ej/.  It may have been due to spelling, but it may also have been due
>to the number of alternations within the language, such as
>/sejn/-/s&nIti/, or irregular past tenses like /bajt/-/bIt/,
>/rajt/-/rItIn/, etc.
That is true.  I'd suspect it's the influence of the spelling system, rather
than something internalized.  As you may know, Chomsky & Halle's _Sound
Pattern of English_ accounted for lots of English peculiarites by positing
an underlying sound system in which, essentially, as I recall, the Great
Vowel Shift had not taken place.