Re: troubles with IPA vowels (was: Leute)

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).

(When talking of English, I exclude Southern Hemisphere varieties, which
are quite different.)

--
                Si hoc legere scis, nimium eruditionis habes.

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