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

Quoting Muke Tever <hotblack@...>:

> On Fri, 23 Jul 2004 06:20:26 -0400, J. 'Mach' Wust <j_mach_wust@...>
> wrote:
> > I think that this might be the difference between allophones and
> > archiphonemes (a term I didn't know before): archiphonemes are a notion
> > that tries to reconciliate the different phonemic systems of the
> > different dialects of a language, saving thus the unity of the language.
>
> Specifically an 'archiphoneme' refers to places where the underlying
> phoneme can't be pinned down due to neutralization. (This could be within
> a dialect as well as cross-dialectally.)  For example an archiphoneme
> covers certain nasals before certain consonants in English: some might say
> it is difficult to prove whether the [n] in <bend> is actually an /n/
> underlyingly[1]
Never heard that one, but I've seen it argued that the [N] in "think" is an /n/.

Can't recall what the supposed benefit of that interpretation is - offhand, I
guess one might try and eliminate the /N/ phoneme wholly by interpreting
syllable-final [N] as /ng/.

                                                    Andreas

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