Re: troubles with IPA vowels (was: Leute)

John Cowan wrote:
> J. 'Mach' Wust scripsit:
>
> > You might have a look at the standardized SAMPA for English (
> > http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/english.htm ), esp. at note 1.
> > (ii):
> >
> > > (ii) The symbol /E/ is quite widely used
> > > in place of /e/ for the vowel of "pet".
> >
> > So according to SAMPA, the normal transcription is /e/.
>
> Ah.  That reflects the fact that there are two traditions for writing
> English phonemically, based on the fact that there is a basic opposition
> in English between the inherited lax monophthongs that represent the
> Germanic
> short vowels, and the tense diphthongs that represent the German long
> vowels
> after being put through the Great Vowel Shift.  So "pet" is [pEt] and
> "pate" is [pejt], and you can transcribe these phonemically as /pEt/ and
> /pet/,
> or as /pet/ and /pejt/ (or rather /peyt/, using the non-IPA Americanist
> tradition whereby "y" has the sound of IPA [j], as in English
> orthography).
>
And yet two more systems, which I've seen mainly in British publications--

--One uses the correct IPA symbols:
/i/ the tense high vowel
/small cap I/ lax high vowel
/e/ tense mid vowel
/epsilon/ lax mid vowel
etc.
(Essentially the same as using X-SAMPA i, I, e, E)

--The other uses the IPA length sign [:] for the tense vowels:
/i:/ high tense front
/i/ high lax front
/e:/
/e/
etc.

All systems use /æ/ (ash, &) for the low front vowel, and /a/ for the low
central/back vowel even though it varies [a]~[6]~[A], but run into trouble
with the [o] and [O] sounds--
Amer. /ow/ Brit. /o:/ for the tense vowel of "boat, so"-- but IIRC there is
no Amer. counterpart */o/ (Brit. may use that for their "pot, caught" but
what about "law, saw"? since lax V aren't supposed to occur in CV
monosyllables...?)

Amer. /reversed c/ for our "law, caught", but there is no diphthongized
*/rev.c+w/

(I also exclude antipodean varieties, which are a kettle of fish of another
color.)

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