Re: Not phonetic but ___???

Gary Shannon:
> I'm looking for a term to describe a linguistic
> concept having to do with pronunciation.  This is kind
> of difficult to explain, so bear ith me while I try to
> make my question understandable.
>
> A phonetic alphabet is meant to describe what a
> particular sound actually sounds like.  Thus a word
> can be transcribed in different ways to represent the
> different manners in which it is pronounced in various
> dialects or with various foreign accents.  As a
> result, someone transcribing their own speech into
> some phonetic alphabet could possily transcribe that
> word differently from someone else who spoke with a
> different dialect or accent.  But what I'm looking for
> is a variation on a phonetic alphabet that it
> independant of dialect or accent so that even if two
> people spoke with different dialects or accents they
> would still transcribe the word in the same way.
>
> For example, I might want to say that however YOU
> pronounce the vowel sound in "fat", you should
> pronounce the vowel sound in my conlang word "glap"
> the same way.  Thus different people might pronounce
> "fat" in slightly different ways in the absolute
> sense, but each would pronounce "glap" in the same way
> they pronounce "fat" and so they would all be said to
> pronounce "glap" the same way in the _relative_ sense.
>
> Thus the symbols of this "relative phonetic alphabet"
> would not relate to absolute sounds, but to sounds
> relative to how you normally pronounce other sounds in
> your own dialect or accent.
[...]
> In other words, some symbol like '#' would NOT
> represent some pure definition of a sound, but would
> represent, to each individual speaker, a different
> sound that was relative to his own native dialect or
> accent.  I want to be able to say, in effect, I don't
> care how you pronounce "glap" as long as you pronounce
> it with the same vowel sound with which YOU pronounce
> "fat", even if that's different from the way I
> pronounce "fat".  Thus I'd have an alphabet that was
> both "phonetic" and dialect-neutral, which can never
> be acheived using an alphabet that defines absolute
> sounds.  Am I making any sense with this?
There is no technical term for this that parallels _phonetic_
and _phonemic_ (I take it that you aren't talking about
a phonemic system, since you seem to be talking about
something that generalizes across accents). The closest
technical term is _lexical sets_: thus we talk about,
say, the lexical set TRAP and about "the TRAP vowel". The
problem with implementing this in a writing system is
that it requires the writing system to represent every
contrast that any accent makes, and so most of the
contrasts in the writing system will reflect contrasts
that don't exist in most of the accents. To take a
very simple example (ferociously complicated ones available
on request...), we distinguish lexical sets TRAP, PALM and
BATH (because for some accents BATH patterns with TRAP
and for other accents it patterns with PALM), but no
accent has a 3-way contrast between the three sets.
The upside of such a writing system, though, is that it
drastically reduces the number of homographs that have
arisen from formerly contrasting words, since it will
often be the case that in one accent or another the
contrast survives.

--And.