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Websters Diacritic Notation l878

soda', he'r, bi'rd, ato'm (use the same diacritic for sounds spelled with different vowels)

6As:   a- fate, fat, a. sod.a (overdot), a: fall (overdots), a' over-u fina'l, sola'r, a~ care, air

4Es:   e- meet, e underbar prey, eight, egg, leg. e~ her, e met

4Is:   i- bar-I for ice, i: marine, bi~rd, pin

3Os:  o: overdots more, for, o litl u atom, word

5Us:  u bar use, u underdots bull, u overdot brute, u~til urn, u up

Response to Ian's post on SAMPA

J.C. Wells' SAMPA notation is a multinational project for narrow transcription. Therefore there are a lot more phonemes that need to be represented than the 46 (34 pure phonemes) for English.

see http://pages.whowhere.com/community/sbett/spel-link.html

Wells has phoneme inventories for about 20 different languages all in SAMPA notation.

The only problem is that the sounds are illustrated with words from the foreign language, not English.

My project will be to try to come up with a matrix that shows the phoneme inventory for 6 languages in one matrix. The phoneme boundaries will be a bit broader than Wells has used because I am trying to relate as much as possible back to English key words. Taam and John G. will help with this project. Others are invited to participate.

Additional comments below.

Steve sbett@mailcity.com

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On Fri, 02 Oct 98 12:58:13 P Ian Ascott wrote:

>I am not sure that SAMPA is such an impressiv project >as you intimate. >VAULS (VOWLS) > >'British' Q for O in lot (lQt)...what a strange thing to do... what is wrong with speliq 'lot' as lot ? SEE ABOVE. IN CCS lot is lo.t, One way to write the checked vowel marker is [q]. This also shows a close relation with [a]. In CCS o. and a [aa] are equivalent [a] being a slightly extended version of o. > >In general, one can get by without introduciq another >letter (eg @) for the schwa. For the front schwa-type vowel. I use 'i', and for the back, I use 'a' and so faa no-one has objected. THERE SHOULD BE A SYMBOL FOR EVERY PHONEME. If schwa is a phoneme, then it needs a separate symbol. Ian does have a symbol for schwa [c], he just doesn't use it. Portuguese also gets by without a symbol for the unstressed central vowel. casa = caas@. CCS marks the schwa [a'] which can be reduced to the schwapostrope ['] in the cases where Ian tends to use an i. .

> >As far as the use of U for OO in 'foot' is concerned, I thought >I had been pluggiq this for years, in spite of the sneers of Marsha, >Ron, Allan et al... This is merely common sense: >put, fut, pudiq, puz, pul etc (put foot pudding push pull). >Also kud, wud, zud (could, would, should)...z =3D TO sh. CCS USES u' for fu't and u for fud [food]. SAMPA uses fUt fud.

> >The use of V in strVt (strut) is borrowed from the IFA where >the short version of 'aa' (aadvaak) is written 'a' but in the IFA it = >becomes >an inverted 'v' (like a small cap A without a crossbar). I think >this is a mistake.. 'a' nat, bat, pat (nut but putt) is better if one >replaces /a/ fat, mat, cap >with =E1 (accented a), as in /=E1/ f=E1t, m=E1t, k=E1p. > >I am unable tu sympathize with N for NG... after all we kno that >'q' is a redundant letter and is ideal for the third nasal... thus >mjniq, m=E1niq, namiq (meaning, manning, numbing). SAMPA miniN, mAniN, nvmiN. Not a bad solution when the object is to choose a look-alike for the IPA ng symbol. > >I wud certainly like tu discuss SAMPA with Prof. Wells some time. >I'l be in yirip next year...mb then > >Ian...

Chris Upward wrote:

"A.Pedant said that all spoken languages are phonetic: it's Welsh *spelling* that's phonetic"

and felt I was indeed being pedantic and (I think) unconstructive.

I wasn't trying to be unhelpful: it's the very confusion of a "language" and it's written representation "spelling" that bedevils many of our efforts. It underlies the concerns of those who think that changing the spelling changes the language, and simplifying the spelling means a degredation of the language and its intrinsic beauty. That's a specious argument, but it isn't helped by confusing language and spelling.

Turkish didn't lose any of its elegance and subtlety when it moved from Arabic script to Roman letters. English didn't lose any power or vigour when it abandoned eth and thorn (shame they died tho). French didn't lose its charm when it changed the -ois endings into -ais. German didn't lose its forcefulness when it threw out the "h" in "thon, thun, neanderthal". Portuguese didn't become less Iberian by changing "y" to "i" (eg in the name Lynda / Linda). Swedish didn't leave Scandinavia when it changed "qv" to "kv". and so on, and so on.

J