Re: Not phonetic but ___???

Philippe Caquant wrote:

>I suppose you have to take some dialect as the
>referent one. If you decide that in that dialect, the
>sound "a" in "fat" is the same than the one is "glap",
>then you use the same symbol for both of them, and it
>doesn't matter whether somebody finds it nicer to
>pronounce them like "ea" in "peak", provided he does
>so in both cases, and provided it doesn't bring
>confusions with other words, if possible (I think
>sometimes it does).
>
>
>
Indeed.  But you need to represent every single phoneme in every
single(widespread, native) dialect.  That is the nature of the quest.
So, while, essentially, taking a referent dialect(probably British
English, if I was doing it), you would have to add symbols for the
disctinction between the sounds in <car>, <father>, and <grass>, even
though there is none in my dialect.  If you were taking an American
dialect, you'd have to represent the difference between the vowel in
<grass> and that in <hat>, though there is no distinction in American
English, there is in some dialects of British English and New Zealand
English(I believe).  That's the only example I know first hand.  It is
by no means an impossibility to construct a dialect-neutral, phonemic
orthography.

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