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

On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 10:52:45 -0400, J. 'Mach' Wust <j_mach_wust@...>
wrote:

> Philippe Caquant wrote:
>> BTW, I may have bad eyes, but I couldn't find any
>> differentiation between English and French 'p' (like
>> in 'pound' # 'pondre') or 't' (like in 'to' # 'tout')
>> for ex. To me, the English consonants are much
>> stronger. Did I miss something ? Or does one have to
>> use diacritic signs ?
>
> This is an excellent example of how broad phonetic analysis is language
> specific: In a broad phonetic transcription, [tu] might be a French word
> or
> an English word, though in a narrower phonetic transcription, the English
> word is more likely to be written as [t_hu:], with the 'diacritical' <_h>
> indicating the aspiration, whereas the French might be transcribed as
> [t_du], with the 'diacritical' <_d> indicating that the stop is dental,
> not
> alveolar (I hope I'm not wrong).
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.






Paul

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