Re: Not phonetic but ___???

Philippe Caquant scripsit:

> So why not stick to this IPA representation
> as a convenient way to figure the "standard"
> pronunciation ? (and then learn dialects later, if
> needed).
Because of a sociolinguistic fact about English that does not at all apply
to French: its dialects do not form a social hierarchy with a single
standard form which almost everyone recognizes as socially superior to
their own.  The system of English dialects not only has multiple top
levels (cultivated people from London, Boston, and Houston do not wish
to sound like each other), but even has loops (local dialect speakers
in North Carolina and Tennessee actually derogate each others' dialects).

> The question is of course, what dialect the makers of
> the dictionnary chose. Well, they probably thought
> about that themselves, and there must be some reason
> why they decided to choose such or such pronunciation
> as a standard.
There's a tendency to use the British Received Pronunciation in bilingual
dictionaries, for a variety of reasons:  1) the dialects of Britain
do form such a hierarchy, to a first approximation; 2) Britain is the
origin point of English; 3) the U.K. is a European nation, unlike the
other anglophone nations, and so its pronunciations are more relevant
to Europeans; 4) inertia from the 19th-century situation, when standard
British pronunciations probably were at the top of a worldwide hierarchy.

> If the differences are too important
> now between English from England, USA or Australia,
> that probably means that English is going to diverge
> into several different languages.
Sociolinguistic heterarchy of the kind I'm describing doesn't necessarily
have to do with mutual intelligibility.  Every American dialect with
few exceptions is mutually intelligible with every Canadian dialect,
but Canadians are (generally speaking) proud of their dialects and
don't want to sound like Yanks.  (Americans think Canadians already
speak American.)

Quebecois, on the other hand, are also proud of their dialect, but
concede that hexagonal French is the standard variety: tellingly,
immigrants are taught Standard French, not local French, in the schools
of Quebec.

--
John Cowan      jcowan@reutershealth.com        http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        Is it not written, "That which is written, is written"?

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