Re: Spelling pronunciations (was: rhotic miscellany)

On Sat, 6 Nov 2004 19:56:47 -0500, Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...> wrote:

>On Sat, 06 Nov 2004 19:04:12 +0000, Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
>
>> My dictionary says of the pronunciation /'wEskIt/
>
>Really with an /E/? I'd've said /'wes:k1t/ (with an ambisyllabic /s/ -- I
>don't know the right symbol for that, but I've seen /p:/ used for the |pp|
>in |happy|, so I fugured "why the hell not?") more matches what I'm used
>to hearing, when I hear it, which isn't all that often.
Maybe some use it this way, but to me (speaker of a language with long
consonants), this seems to be a very confusing notation. The Duden uses a
dot below in order to mark ambisyllabic consonants. In that particular case,
however, I don't see any reason why the syllable border should fall together
with the /s/.

Both /e/ and /E/ are used for the representation of the English vowel of
|pet, bed|, but the corresponding pronunciations are much closer to each
other than the French vowels /e - E/.

gry@s:
j. 'mach' wust