Re: Vowels?
| From: | Chris Palmer <cecibean@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, January 24, 2002, 18:02 |
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On Wednesday, January 23, 2002, at 11:16 , Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>> No line need be drawn: [R] is a vowel, just as much as [i] is.
>
> But that's only true for Americans which have a rhotic dialect. British
> English
> [R] can only be used as a consonant (writer is pronounced there /RaIt@/,
> not /RaItR=/). Don't presuppose that what is true of our dialect is true
> everywhere.
Anything in square brackets is phonetic transcription; forward slashes
denote phonemic transcription and curly braces or quotes denote
orthographic transcription. If I had said "/r/ is a vowel" or "{r} is a
vowel", I would have been overstating the case, since not all allophones
of /r/ (spelled {r}) are vowels. However, I said [R]--a *phonetic*
transcription--is a vowel, because it is.
(Someone posted that in X-SAMPA [R] is the French {r} transcribed in IPA
as an upside-down capital R. To clarify, I'm not using X-SAMPA because I
don't know it.)
> The line you so much want to draw is drawn at different places by
> different languages. So why drawing a line which is so much
> language-dependent
> when talking about phonology in general?
The line I'm drawing is one of phonetic (articulatory), not phonemic.
Phonetically, the line is relatively clear, I repeat.
--
Chris
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