Re: troubles with IPA vowels (was: Leute)

On Sat, 24 Jul 2004 07:57:19 -0400, John Cowan <jcowan@...> 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/
I'd rather think that the reason is that the vowel of English <pet> is
halfway between IPA [e] and [E], so that it's hard to decide which one
should be used. This is based on the assumption that [e] and [E] correspond
to French /e/ and /E/ as in <chanterai> [Sa_~tRe] vs. <chanterais> [Sa_~tRE]
(in conservative standard pronunciation).

The SAMPA doesn't offer the two options you mentioned, but rather /pet -
peIt/ vs. /pEt - peIt/.

g_0ry@_ˆs:
j. 'mach' wust

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