IPA/CXS questions

On Wed, 2005-12-07 at 23:04 -0500, Mark J. Reed wrote:
> On 12/7/05, Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:
>         There's also "reversed epsilon" (CXS [3]) which I at least
>         modify with
>         circumflex (IPA hook) for the retroflexed _stressed_ vowel of
>         bird, hurt et
>         al. [3^]. But I'm not sure this is proper CXS. Your [r\=] gets
>         the point
>         across too.
>
> I thought the CXS for rhotic hook was `, not ^?
Yes, that's true. ` is a rhotic hook on vowels and a retroflexion
diacritic on consonants. I can't think of what ^ means though---I think
some people might use it to denote superscripts, thus t^h instead of t_h

>         The unstressed final version (as in the -er suffix) would then
>         be [@^]; the
>         two vowels are phonetically distinct IMO.
>
> Not IMD; "bird" and "encumbered" and "burred" are a three-way perfect
> rhyme.   But that way lies YAEPT.
I don't mean to take you up on the YAEPT, but I am slightly curious---is
it really a perfect rhyme, and the difference in stress doesn't get in
the way? I thought most dialects had the last syllable of "encumbered"
unstressed, and rhyming is usually considered to occur from the last
stressed syllable unwards---thus "encumbered" can normally only rhyme
with two-or-more syllable words.

(At this point, Roger wrote and Mark snipped:)
> > One advantage of this system is
> > that for non-rhotic dialects, you simply drop the diacritic ^.
Not quite true---most transcriptions of non-rhotic dialects mark length,
whereas American English at least is typically written without length
marked, thus /3`/ -> /3:/ and /@`/ -> /@/. Still, in the normal way of
writing RP you can always work out from the symbols whether a length
mark should follow or not. (One common way of writing Australian English
doesn't mark length used by frex. the Macquarie Dictionary; it strikes
me as pretty silly because then the only phonetic difference
between /fVs/=[fa_"s] and /fAs/=[fa_":s] is not even mentioned.)

--
Tristan

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