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

From:Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Date:Thursday, July 22, 2004, 9:26
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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Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>