Re: european roots, etc.

On Sun, 1 Apr 2001, Muke Tever wrote:

> > From:    Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
> > Subject: Re: "y" and "r"
> >
> > JOOC, then, where do things like the American Heritage Dictionary or the
> > World Book Dictionary get their pronunciations?  Do they take an
> > average of news anchor voices or something?  :-p
>
> Possibly an average of dialects.
> Of course, they can't get everyone's right.  AHD4's pronunciation key
> <http://www.bartleby.com/61/12.html>, frex, marks the vowel in 'f[a]ther'
> with one sign, 'pot' with another sign, and the vowel in 'caught, paw, for,
> h[o]rrid, hoarse' with another.  But for myself I have one vowel in 'father,
> pot, caught, paw', and another in 'for, horrid, hoarse'.
I have one in "father, pot, caught," a slightly lower vowel in "paw," and
another in "for, horrid, hoarse."

This reminds me of the first few lectures of phonology/phonetics (which I
was auditing before Real Life caught up, alas): every time Ladefoged's
text made some claim about people's phonetic values, everyone in the
class was clamoring about "but *my* vowel doesn't distribute like that"
and the poor prof had her hands full trying to tell people to calm down,
Ladefoged couldn't capture all dialects, let alone individual variations....

> Plus their treatment of vowels before <r> is weird.  Either they have
> different vowels than elsewhere or they do it for unexplained mnemonic
> value, but they have, say, e-breve in 'pet' but â (a-circumflex) in 'care'.
> I have, AFAICT, the same vowel in both, and while it may be longer in 'care'
> because of the r's influence, it certainly isn't a-like.
>
> Er, this has no relation to your question, I'm sorry.
'Sokay, it's enlightening.  I wish American English dictionaries would
use the IPA (now that I've learned most of the symbols I run across
frequently).  I've never figured out where they get their various systems.

YHL

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