Re: YAEPT: Enuf is Enuf: Some Peepl Thru with Dificult Spelingz

On 13/07/06, Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:
> Tristan Alexander McLeay wrote:
> > > > [*]: It's not so much the fact that Americans don't distinguish the
> > > > qualities in "curry" and "furry" that doesn't cease to surprise me....
>
> I've been wondering about this. Is it possible that British(-based) speech
> uses a more [6]-like vowel in "curry (the food)", somewhat closer I think to
> the actual Indian (?) and Malay (['kari]) pronunciation??? After all, you're
> much more exposed to it than we are.  What vowel do you use, then, in the
> expression "to curry favour", or when "currying" i.e. using a "curry-comb"
> on your horse? For me as for Mark, these all have the same vowel and are
> perfect rhymes-- along with hurry, blurry, slurry, jury, Murray et Al.
No. The difference is etymological. "Furry" is fur+y, so it sounds
like it: /f3:/ + /i/ -> [f2:ri]. "Curry" is a single morpheme, and if
onset maximisation is desirable, there's no reason the /r/ should
influence the previous vowel, and you get [k_ha_"ri].

For those words, I've got (monomorphemic, short vowel) "curry, hurry,
slurry, Murray" with [a_"ri]; (bimorphemic) "furry, blurry" with
[2:ri]; and (monomorphemic, long vowel) "jury" with [dZu_+ri]; I also
have (bimorphemic, long vowel) "Jewry" with [dZu\_+ri]---not something
I've ever noticed until now but strikes me as a little more evidence
that I still have a phoneme /U@/ in spite of normal descriptions of
AusE.

===========

On 13/07/06, Carsten Becker <carbeck@...> wrote:
> From: "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
> Sent: Wednesday, July 12, 2006 8:29 AM
>
> > You seem to use <oo> for both /u/ ("yoo" above) and /o:/
> > ("beeloo", er, below).  Even in only final position I think that's
> > a distinction we need to keep.
>
> Way árn't wi sımpli ıntrədyúsıng mór letəs fór đə vauəls?
> Ólsŏ, yú jəst hëv tə get rıd əf jə 'dayəkrıtəfŏbia' ...
> Đët'd meyk ŧıngs ə gud díl íziə ay ŧingk.*
>
> OK, that above looks horrible IMO ... and I don't speak
> _that_ British either.** But why don't we simply use some of
> the IPA vowel signs in addition? It's clear that English
> has more phonemic vowels than the five cardinal ones that
> are included in the Alphabet (aeiou), and I don't like too
> weird diagraphs either (They have a use in Irish and Scots
> Gaelic, though!). There's aɐɑɒɔeɘəɛɜɞɤiıoɵɶɷuʉʊʋʌʚ in IPA,
You forgot ɨ (i\), ɯ (M), ø (2), œ (9) and æ (&)! Also, ı is not
kosher IPA: lax i is ɪ; ɷ is an old-fashioned variant of  ʊ and so
isn't distinct from it in IPA; and ʚ is just a mistake for ɞ.

> that should be enough to choose from.
Personally, I vote we go for the ramshorns ɤ (7). My favorite IPA
character. Don't care what vowel we use it for [no /7/ in English :(],
but surely *something* deserves to be spelt with it!

Still, we can spell AusE with no more characters than is used to write
German if we allow digraphs for our consonants, and if we just
rhoticise it it should suit everyone, even tho' some of the pairs
might be slightly unintuitive. Thus:

I => i
I@ => ie or ier
i: => ii (or ei to avoid confusion of ii and ü in handwriting)
e => e
e: => ee or eer
& => ä
&: => ää or ä
&i => äi
&O => äo
a => a
a: => aa or ar
Ae => ai (or ae for more distinction from äi)
@u\ => ou (or oü)
O => o
o: => oo/oor/uur
oi => oi
U => u
u\: => uu (or üü)
U@ => uur
2: => öö or öör (how do rhotic-types pronounce French words like "hors
d'oeuvre" (me: [o:d2:v])?)
@ => ö (or e or a with some minimal ambiguity)

Of course, using üü is more than is necessary, and we might be able to
get away without ö if we're happy to have some ambiguity or just
replace it with another letter like ə or y (or normally spell /@/ as e
or a; the ambiguity is almost free). I like to include a distinct
spelling for üü in my personal AusE-centric respellings because [u\:]
and [u:] feel like different phonemes to me even tho there's no real
minimal pairs unless that earlier-found distinction of "Jewry" vs
"jury" counts, or weirdisms in other Frenchish words like "bourgeois"
[bu:Zwa:].

> *tongue-in-cheek* Or, just adapt my Tahano Nuhikamu writing
> system. That'd surely be fun ... ;-)
...

> *) I'd suggest this:
>
> p - p                  i - i
> b - b                  i: - i
> t - t                  I - ı
> d - d                  E - e
> k - k                  æ - ë
> tS - c                 A - a
> dZ - j                 A: - á
> f - f                  Q - o
> v - v                  Q: - ó
For dialects with that contrast, it is by more than just length e.g.
GAmE /A/ vs /O/, RP /Q/ vs /O:/, AusE /O/ vs /o:/.

> T - th (þ? ŧ?)         U - u
> D - dh (ð? đ?)         u - ú
> s - s                  u: - ú (some have [u\:] here)
> z - z                  V - a
No dialect tmk distinguishes all three of /A A: V/; in fact, I have no
idea what contrast you're trying to draw. On the other hand, you
rather sensibly spell /A/ and /V/ the same, so I assume this is just
typo-based confusion?

...

> There exist capital letters for all of these (ƐƏƟ), except
> for ɑ. Would Ϫ (Coptic Gangia, U+03EB) be an alternative?
No. It would be an abuse of Unicode; things like automatic
recapitisation and sorting would fail. We could just finally do away
with caps...

--
Tristan.