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

From:Muke Tever <hotblack@...>
Date:Thursday, July 22, 2004, 2:30
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 23:09:00 +0200, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
wrote:
> Quoting Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>: >> And what could be "indeterminacy in French vowels" ? >> I'm French and just cannot understand what it is >> about. If there was an example, perhaps I could. > > From the mouth of the horse, or at least from the text of the original > X-SAMPA proposal: > > "In deference to the requirements of those working on French, SAMPA has > defined a special role for the forward slash, / (ASCII 47), namely as a > markerof certain vowel archiphonemes or indeterminacies, e.g. maison > /mE/zO~/. It is of course also widely used as a delimiter of phonemic > transcriptions." > > I don't feel appreciably wiser, but then I don't know French (despite > what my sister would tell you!).
It means that there are words in which it is not easy to determine whether the underlying phoneme for some speakers is /e/ or /E/. French SAMPA uses this notation (which is what the X-SAMPA proposal is referring to) and it is described there: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/french.htm To save you clicking if you're not interested: << When they are functional, the load of the oppositions a-A, e~-9~, e-E, o-O, 2-9 may be very low for certain speakers, and there is a tendency towards neutralisation. When they are not functional there is a strong tendency in unstressed syllables towards indetermination. "Indeterminacy" symbols have been agreed to cover occurrences of these phonemes or sounds: E/= e or E A/= a or A &/= 2 or 9 O/= o or O U~/= e~ or 9~ >> *Muke! -- http://frath.net/ (my website) http://kohath.livejournal.com/ http://kohath.deviantart.com/ http://wiki.frath.net/ (conlangs and concultures)