[WikiEN-l] Re: Pronunciations and IPA/SAMPA

[Daniel Ehrenberg]

--- David Friedland <david at 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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