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

From:Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Date:Wednesday, July 21, 2004, 16:04
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