Re: The fourteen vowels of English?
| From: | Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, September 4, 2004, 16:59 |
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On Sat, 04 Sep 2004 11:01:52 -0500, Mark P. Line <mark@...>
wrote:
> Paul Bennett said:
>> I remember reading somewhere that English has 14 vowels (presumably
>> including diphthongs), but that every dialect collapses at least two of
>> them together.
>>
>> Well, I decided to measure my own lect, and got some surprising
>> results. I
>> have at least 17 vowels that I can think of, all of which can appear
>> between /h/ and /d/...
>
> You might consider the possibility that some of your examples contain an
> /r/.
Not in my non-rhotic lect they don't. And really, I'm trying to aim for a
set that's rhoticity-agnostic. Symbols such that if you're rhotic, you put
the /r\/ in, semi-rhotic, you put the /@`/ in, and non-rhotic, you use
/@/. I don't want to specifically spell out that an |r| is or is not
required, since that ties the system to a specific set of lects, and the
plan is to produce a system that gives a translectical phonemic rendering.
Perhaps this is another case where archiphonemes become a useful concept?
Paul
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