--- David Friedland david@nohat.net wrote:
The reasoning behind morphophones is that even though people speak with different regional dialects, how the pronunciations are stored in each person's internal lexicon in their brain is the same, or can be representented symbolically in ways that are equivalent. The morphophonic system taps into this internal consistency between different dialects and thus a single symbolic form can represent the different (but equivalent) pronunciations for speakers of different dialects.
For example, in such system we would have a single symbol for the sound represented by the final "er" in the word "runner". A speaker of a non-rhotic Boston dialect, for example, would then always produce this sound as a plain schwa, and a speaker of, say, standard American would produce it as a rhoticized schwa. In the morphophonic system, only a single pronunciation would be needeed to specify the two different pronunciations in result.
The problem with this system is that the fundamental assumption that internal representations of pronunciations are equivalent is false. This is what I meant by "mildly divergent" dialects. Besides regular sound change, dialects also differ in some cases in how pronunciations are represented in the lexicon. It is simply the case that some dialects have fundamentally different internal representations for the pronunciations of some words.
If you don't agree, then how would you specify a single pronunciation using a morphophonic system for the words "almond", "apricot", "aunt", "controversy", "clerk", "creek", "florida", "garage", "greasy", "lieutenant", "mayonnaise", "mischievous", "pecan", and "tour", just for starters? I just don't see how a simple system could capture all these variants with a single representation. You're not advocating a system that has a symbol that corresponds to /u/ in AmE and /Ef/ in BrE so that "lieutenant" is represented with one set of symbols, are you?
- David [[User:Nohat]]
I'd advocate for such a system. I created a system that can do just that by writing (oo|ayf). If you wanted to do almond, you'd write a-|lmi|und. This can be made slightly less verbose by using accent marks. The other accents besides US and UK English can just infer what sound it will make. I think such a system (although not mine) would work well. I would like to know what linguists use, though. LDan
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