Re: /x/ and 'inter-Germanic' (was: Intergermansk)

On 31 Jan 2005, at 11.46 am, Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 01:23:00AM +0100, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>> Denoting a phoneme that is not pronounced as [S] as /S/ when there is
>> a
>> separate phoneme pronounced as [S] strikes me as a terrible state of
>> affairs.
>
> On behalf of English-speakers everywhere: welcome to our world!  Just
> try to find a phonemic representation of English where the symbol you
> choose for some phoneme X doesn't turn out to be an allophone of
> phoneme
> Y in someone else's 'lect . . .
Yeah, but each dialect tends to be written with appropriate symbols for
that lect. Australian English writes /o:/ for the vowel of 'poor',
'saw', 'sore'. Scottish English writes /o:/ for the vowel of 'no'.

(This is why for phonemic notations intended to be interdialectical, I
use one inspired by the English orthography. I find it much safer and
clearer to say that my surname is pronounced \muh-KLAY\ then
/m@kl&i/---if I said the latter, you might think it was pronounced
\muh-KLY\ (if, though, you ask how *I* say my surname, well /m@kl&i/ is
it). (Well, maybe there's better examples than that, and one reason why
I don't go round using my middle name is because if you pronounced it
\AL-igz-AHN-der\, I would be a bit annoyed... but note that it doesn't
say anything about whether the last vowel is pronounced [@] or [r\=] or
[@r] or [@r\] or [a] or even [I].)

--
Tristan.