Re: (Offlist) Re: ASCII IPA

 --- Roger Mills <romilly@...> wrote: > Javier
wrote:
>
>
> Re the vowels: you are conflating the two (mainly
> British) systems.
> System 1 uses /i:/ vs. /i/ where the colon, which in
> IPA indeed marks
> length, here is used symbolically, I think,  to
> indicate the tenseness.
> After all, the vowel of 'beet, beat' is markedly
> shorter phonetically than
> that of  'bead, bean, be', yet all would be written
> phonemically with /i:/.
> Likewise there is a length difference between "bit"
> and "bid, bin", yet all
> are phonemically /i/.
>
but it doesn't always work. i distinguish three 'i'
sounds in my pronunciation :
1 bit, bid, bin
2 bead, bean, be
3 beard, beer

3 is distinguished from 1 by length and from 2 by
tenseness. i only pronounce a schwa offglide in 3 if
i'm talking in a higher register accent

so i think i'll stick to 1 /I/ 2 /i/ or /i:/ and 3
/I:/

in 2 the : is redundant phonemically but better
represents the characteristic phoneme imo

bn

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