Re: How to Make Chicken Cacciatore (was: phonetics by guesswork)

On Thu, 22 Jul 2004 00:38:57 -0700, Philippe Caquant
<herodote92@...> wrote:
> - "phoneme" is about differentiation in some real
> language (like: t # d, because for ex in French "tes"
> is something different from "des"). The only problem
> being that you won't know in which language this
> differentiation is relevant. Maybe in 999 languages it
> is not, and in the 1000th it is.
Phonemes are only relevant in a given language - if someone says "X
and Y are phonemes in language Z", then that means that X and Y are
considered different in that language. They may be considered
allophones of the same phoneme in a different language W.

So it doesn't make sense to say that "/t/ is a phoneme" without
talking about a specific language.

For example, dental t and alveolar t are phonemes in such languages
(for example, some of the languages spoken in India, I believe), but
are not separate phonemes in English, German, or French.

> (And, ah, just a last question: how should "X-Sampa"
> be pronounced ? Eks-Sampa, Cross-Sampa or Christ-Sampa
> ? Or other ? Just in order to make me look a little
> less dumb).
I pronounce it "Ecks-Sampa". I suppose you could also call it
"Extended Sampa", or even "Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic
Alphabet".

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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