Re: E and e (was: A break in the evils of English (or, Sturnan is beautiful))

At 7:54 pm +1000 1/5/02, Tristan wrote:
>On Wed, 2002-05-01 at 16:04, Raymond Brown wrote:
[sni]
>
>> Those English dialects that use [EI], do not use [eI].  As I understand the
>> phonemic theory, one would say that [e:], [E:], [e@], [I@], [eI], [EI] (and
>
>There are dialects that use [I@] for /ei/? I'll presume they're rhotic.
Yes, I believe they all are.  I associate with certain rustic forms of
southern English which normally use retroflex vowels in the American manner.

[snip]
>
>I'm not quite sure that I understand this. I do believe there was a
>recent thread about tense/laxness which I didn't have the time to read,
>I'll go back and have a look and see if it helps me understand.
>
>> Maybe so.  But phonemically /i:/ ~ /I/ surely must suggest two components
>> of contrast: hight of tongue & length, i.e. it implies four phonemes /i/ ~
>> /i:/ ~ /I/ ~ /I:/, which is not correct.
>
>No, it implies that both length and quality are distinguishing factors
>in /i:/ ~ /I/. Which does not necessarily require there to be four
>phonemes.
Well, as I understand it, while the phonetic transcription is concerned
with both, phonemic transcription is not.  My understanding is that in a
strictly phonemic transcription, the phonemicist must decide which is the
primary distinctive feature.  In this case "Is length the primary
distinguishing feature, with quality a secondary & concomitant feature?" or
"Is quality the primary distinguishing feature and length merely secondary?"

If you answer 'yes' to the first question, then you go for /i:/~/i/ (or if
you think it's not length so much as slight diphthongization*, you have
/ij/~/i/); if you answer 'yes' to the second you have /i/~/I/.

I have seen (but I forget where and when) an analysis on these lines:

Short vowels
   i
   e
   a   [for so it's pronounced in many parts of Britain]

Long vowels
    Faintly diphthongnized   ij
  Moderately diphthongized   ej
    Strongly diphthongized   aj

>The presence of /A/ and /A:/ doesn't mean there has to be a
>/3\/ as well as /3\:/.
Sorry, I don't follow the logic here. What variety of has [A], and isn't
[3\:] considered to be phonemically the 'long' or 'tense' counterpart of
/@/?

[snip]
>
>Okay, maybe you have to look at it from my point of view. Which may be
>entirely flawed, but still. [i:] is about as long as the [A:] in
>'heart'. The vowel in 'heart' is distinguished from the vowel in 'hut'
>by one thing: length.
Not in most (all?) varieties of northern hemisphere English. "hut" in
Britain is, more or less, [hVt] in the south and [hUt] in the north, or
indeed [hV?] or [hU?] being more common among generations younger than me -
but all phonemically rendered /hVt/.  In the US I believe [@] and [V] have
fallen together in many (most??) regions - which posses the question
whether such dialects have both /@/ and /V/ as separate phonemes - a
question that's been debated on this list more than once before.

>The similarity in length suggests to me that if
>you're going to include the length in the vowel of [A:],
But I don't - over here in little ol' England, [A:] doesn't contrast with [A].

[snip]
>/i/. But the first part of the diphthong /I@/, in such words as 'beer',
>has the same quality as that of 'bit' (at least to my ear). There exists
>an allophone of /I@/ in contexts like 'beer is': [I:].
It varies over here between [bI@], [bi@], [bi:`], [bi:r] (with trilled /r/.
Likewise, final sound of words like 'pretty', 'tiny', 'very' etc vary
between [i] (short) generally in southern England, but [I] in many parts of
northern England.  So what is the phoneme.

>Although because
>it's an allophone, does that mean we can ignore it? But the point of it
>means that people hear a longer [I] as something other than /i:/.
We can't ignore allophones because their distribution may well affect the
decisions we make on what the phonemes actually are.  What, e.g. is the
final phoneme in 'pretty'?  If everyone had [i], we'd probably conclude it
was an allophone of the phoneme which, however we might represent it
phonemically, is pronounced [i:].  But with [I] occurring in some dialects,
it makes more sense to regard final [i] as an allophone of "short"-i.

[snip]
>
>(In case anyone was wondering, I speak 'normal' Melburnian* Australian
>English.
Like in Erinsborough?   :)

>> Of course, it may be that the phonemic theory is incorrect - but that's
>> another story  ;)
>
>What alternatives are there to phonemic theory? Phonemic theory seems
>pretty well accepted;
No - it's a very convenient tool, but it doesn't tell the whole story.
There was analternative approach known as the 'Prosodic Phonology'
developed by J.R. Firth in the University of London during the 1940s &
1950s.  It dealt well with phenomena such as vowel harmony where the
phonemic approach is not IMO the best way of dealing with vowels in the
'harmonized' affixes.  And......

...At 7:27 am -0400 1/5/02, Jeff Jones wrote:
>On Wed, 1 May 2002 19:54:34 +1000, Tristan <zsau@...> wrote:
[snip]
>There's a whole mess of newer phonology theories. Dirk and some others here
>are experts on those.
Indeed there are - and I can't keep up with them all  :)

>As I understand it, Phonemics is not so much a scientific theory as an
>"engineering tool" used in developing practical orthographies for languages
>that don't have any.
I think that right.

>It doesn't have to be perfect, since extralinguistic
>factors tend to interfere anyway. For some languages and dialects, the
>phoneme set is obvious, while for others, you'd have to go through a whole
>book of procedures to determine the phonemes. I suspect Melburnian is one
>of the latter.
I suspect to get a single phoneme set that satisfactorily covers all 'main
stream' varieties of English is not a trivial task (if, indeed, such a set
exists).
----------------------------------------------------------

At 12:49 pm -0400 1/5/02, Roger Mills wrote:
>Ray Brown wrote, inter alia:
[snip]
>
>Exactly.  Those are the three systems I'm aware of.
>1. /ij/ vs. /i/ (more commonly in the US /iy/ : /i/)
>2. /i/ vs /I/
>3. /i:/ vs. /i/ (actually equiv. to #1, replacing |glide| with |length|)
>
>Well make that four, if you include Distinctive Feature analysis: (there are
>plus signs here, which may not reproduce)--
>underlying /i/ [+voc, +hi, +tense]-- at the surface (phonetic) level,
>[+tense} --> the appropriate homorganic glide [j], or [w] for back vowels;
Yes, I'd forgotten the "Distinctive Feature" analysis, tho it's not exactly
uncommon.

>the 3 phonetic lengths that we see in e.g. "beat, bead, bean" are also
>assigned by rules at the surface level.
Yep - certainly not a phonemic feature, but IMO those who put forward
short~long opposition as a constituent part of the phonemic distinction
between [i:] and [I] should not IMO ignore the difference of length in
other context. Just like "beat, bead, bean", the /I/ in "bit, bid, bin"
also differs in length.

[snip]
>
>Chomsky & Halle's "Sound Pattern of English" did manage to show the
>relationships, but only at the cost of proposing underlying forms [snip]
>which many many many people balked at).  Although they did (I think) explain
>English vowel alternations & stress in a great tour-de-force, it was only by
>introducing a great deal of history, and some very complex rules, into the
>analysis;  and I suspect very few scholars have adopted the SPE system.
Yes, I agree.  IMO 'generative phonology' is the least credible of the
Chomskyan theories (I don't want to start a flame-war with any Chomskyans -
I'm merely stating it as my opinion); it appears to be a complicated way of
reconstructing what is, in effect, the diachronic history of sound
development in a language.  That, it seems to me, is the only way to
explain things like 'divine' ~ 'divinity'

In any case spelling and analogy are changing this even as we speak.  When
I was young, I heard nothing except ["prIv@si] for "privacy", but now
["praIv@si] is common enough; similarly 'subsidence' was pronounces with
stress on first syllable, and the rest unstressed ["sVsIdn=s], but now
[s@b"saIdn=s] is not uncommon among speakers of all 'classes' - and so I
could go on.

[snip]
>>
>>Of course, it may be that the phonemic theory is incorrect - but that's
>>another story  ;)
>
>Umm, yes. :-)
Indeed, it seems to me no theory has the 100% perfect solution.  One uses
the best tools available   ;)

Ray.

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