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

Hate it when I hit send before I'm done...  time to say hello to my
quota ("Hi, Quota!  How's the wife and kids?")

On 7/11/06, Philip Newton <philip.newton@...> wrote:
> (Unless you take the step of
> unifying /u/ and /U/, as argued e.g. in 7.1 of
> http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/accents_spellingreform.htm . But
> then I'm not sure what cue signifies that |u| = /u or U/ rather than
> /V/.)
Indeed.  Almost all, if not all, English speakers have distinct vowels
in "luck" and "Luke".  Most have yet a third vowel in "look", but some
pronounce it the same way as either of the first two. So a partial
merger is possible, but you still need at least two symbols for the
vowels in those three words.  Daniel's message seems to use the
spelling "u" for all three.

One may argue that e.g. "Luke" has a phonemic glide (phonetically
masked by the lateral onset), but while that is defensible in the case
of the words currently spelled with a <u..e>, it's not in the case of
the words spelled with an <oo>; nobody argues that the proper
pronunciation of "mood" is /mjud/ (although I suppose some folks
pronounce *all* the <oo>  words with /U/, such that "mood" rhymes with
"good").

I definitely think you need at least two phonemic vowels (and
therefore two spellings) for this group of sounds.

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>