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

On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 11:29:53AM -0400, Paul Bennett wrote:
> Yeah. That's actually the difference between writing /tu/ and [t_hu]. We
> (and the rest of the IPA-using planet, and indeed I think the Americanist
> tradition, too) use slashes for phonemic notation, and brackets for
> phonetic notation, the former basically being looser and the latter
> tighter. There is a better definition of phonemic vs phonetic, but I
> cannot find it right now, hopefully somebody more well-versed in the
> subject than I will be able to help you.
Ah, but there are more than two degrees of looseness/tightness.  It's
true that the slashes denote phonemic transcription, which is
necessarily broad, but transcriptions in square brackets vary widely in
precision.   When one is calling attention to a particular variation in
pronunciation, other non-phonemic distinctions not under consideration
are often left out.  For instance, if I were illustrating the fact shared
by many English dialects that vowels lengthen before voiced consonants,
I might write the representations of "speed" /spid/ and "peat" /pit/ as
[spi:d] and [pit], ignoring the fact that they're really e.g. [spi:d_}]
and [p_hit_}].

-Marcos