Re: Phonetic scripts and diphthongs ...

Quoting David Peterson <ThatBlueCat@...>:

> Andreas wrote:
>
> <<But the same applies to affricates, and
> single letters for affricates are all over the place; English supplies 'j'
> for
> /dZ/ (a case where IPAoid phonemic representation is _farther_ from the
> 1-to-1
> ideal than the much-maligned English orthography). Anyone's got any thoughts
> as
> to the possible causes of this apparent asymmetry?>>
>
> The IPA representation is the way it is because affricates are sequences of
> two different sounds.   Psychologically, though, affricates are pretty much
> always thought of as single "letters", no matter how they're represented
> (e.g., "ch").
My understanding is that much the same applies to diphthongs - speakers tend to
think of them as single units. Nonetheless, they're much less likely to be
represented by single graphemes.

(I didn't mean to diss the IPA, btw - it's just that using a basically phonetic
system for phonemic representation is prone to lead to some inconsistencies.)

> John Ohala (the former phonetics professor at Berkeley)
> proved
> this during one of our classes.   He chose a random student (native English
> speaker) and gave them a series of words.   After each word, they had to
> say whether it was in the set, or whether it wasn't.   The professor would
> then respond "correct" or "incorrect".   So, he started out with "couch", the
> student said "in thet set", and he said "incorrect", and it went on this way,
> and pretty soon the whole class got the idea that the set was whatever began
> with a complex coda.   Once it was clear to everyone, and once the student
> obviously knew what the set was, he said the word "charm", and the student
> said "not in the set".   That was my natural reaction, too, even though I
> should've
> known better.
I don't really get this - do you mean complex _onsets_?


                                                          Andreas