Re: English notation

Herman Miller wrote:
>I can't have any _"long"_ vowels before /N/ (although I do have the
>diphthong oi before /N/ in a handful of words) -- thus, I've used long
>vowels before /N/ as features of alien languages to distinguish them from
>English. "Randarong", the name of a city, is natively pronounced
>/'randaro:N/ (not /'rænd@rON/ as it would be in my English pronunciation).
Same here, on both counts.

>I have "short" vowels only before intervocalic /r/ (the word "sorry"
>/'sQri/ is the only one that comes to mind, but it's possible there are
>others). Other vowels before /r/ are so different from non-r-colored vowels
>that for a long time I accepted the traditional idea that they're really
>the "short" vowels. But I think they're more intermediate between the
>"short" and "long" vowels, and a bit closer to the "long" ones. In
>particular, the /or/ in "story" contrasts with the /Qr/ in "sorry". I also
>distinguish between one-syllable "sear" /sir/ and two-syllable "seer"
>/si@r/, although this may be an idiosyncrasy.
I'd write /sir/ 'sear' vs. /siy@r/ or /siyr=/ (syllabic r) 'seer'.....(This
is where the never-very-popular usage of /...ihr/, which I mentioned in
another post, came in handy.)   And "sorry" seems to vary between what you
cite and much more casual ['sari]-- homonymous with the Indian ladies
garment.
It's the old problem of tense/lax neutralization before /r/.  _Phonetically_
the vowel in "sear" is neither the [i] of "seat" nor the [I] of "sit", but
somewhere in between (at least for me, you, and many others).  Same with the
vowel of "sore"-- neither that of "boat" nor "bought".  In _phonemic_ terms,
it seems almost a toss-up whether to assign "sear" etc. to tense /iy/ or lax
/i/, and I don't recall offhand what criteria were used in classical
phonemics to justify the assignment to /i/-- except perhaps that it just
seemed more reasonable.   It may well be a distributional thing-- I can't
think of very many (any??) mono-morphemic Engl. words with the sequence
[ir(V)] ...(phonemic /...iyr(V)/:   Leroy? if pronounced as "Lee-roy" (but
that's a Name, and ult. foreign anyway; also there's an ancient morpheme
boundary in there-- as also in "deride, berate" etc.);  note too that
"searing" "leering" etc. seem to show the short/lax vowel (at least for me):
['sIrIN,  'lIrIN]  (but the syllable boundary is still after the r, and
there's the N-problem too.  Aargh.) But to pronounce these with tense [i]
sounds quite strange.

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