Re: New Try from a New Guy

In a message dated 12/14/02 1:11:58 PM, hsteoh@QUICKFUR.ATH.CX writes:

>On Sat, Dec 14, 2002 at 09:58:00AM -0800, Michael David Martin wrote:
>[snip]
>> 2. I understand the differences between phones and phonemes, but I'm
>not
>> sure if I should be putting [ ] or / / around the sounds in the above
>chart.
>> For example, I'm using [3] and representing it with uh, but when I listen
>to
>> the sounds on the IPA web site the sounds [@], [3], [6] and [V] all sound
>> close enough to me to be the same letter. I can hear the differences,
>I just
>> don't think the differences are big enough. So, I would consider these
>four
>> phones to be a single phoneme, correct? But if I write /3/ how does someone
>> else know that [@], [3], [6] and [V] are all included?
>[snip]
>
>You could list [@], [3], [6], [V] as allophones, and say that they
>correspond to the same phoneme, /3/.
But that would be saying that that one phoneme is sometimes pronounced like
[@], sometimes like [3], sometimes like [6], and other times like [V],
depending on what other sounds it's near in a particular word. This is
possible, but what I think you (Michael) are saying is that you want this to
be one sound, but you can't quite pin down an IPA letter to represent it
with. If you want it to be like a certain English sound you're thinking of,
it's probably either [V] (as in the first syllable of 'butter') or [@] (as in
the first syllable of 'potato' - both of those in 'standard' American
pronunciation at least). Or you might want the first pronunciation when it's
stressed, and the second when it's not, or something similar.

>
>
>T
>
>--
>Music critic: "That's an imitation fugue!"
Josh Roth
http://members.aol.com/fuscian/home.html

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