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From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: languages with phonetic alphabets?
Message-ID: <D69sFw.9r6@spss.com>
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Organization: SPSS Inc
References: <3kv7jk$61e@news1.delphi.com> <D62nrq.G1I@eskimo.com> <D64HvA.4t0@spss.com> <D64o7r.Jts@eskimo.com>
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 1995 20:19:07 GMT
Lines: 18

In article <D64o7r.Jts@eskimo.com>, Richard Wojcik <rickw@eskimo.com> wrote:
>At this point, we need to consider the nature of phonemic mergers and how
>they ought to be represented.  What is the optimal way of representing
>phonemic overlap in alphabetic writing?  Sanskrit happens to use a more
>shallow representation, but most of the world's writing systems seem to
>prefer a deeper representation.  Hence, we do not tend to represent vowel
>reduction in our formal spelling system, although it is the cause of many
>spelling errors, both in English and Russian.  If you were to represent
>Russian "with" in "s Borisom" with a "z" letter, you would be more accurate
>from a phonemic point of view, but you would impede morphological
>recognition.  

Why would this be more accurate from a phonemic point of view?  Are you
saying that the Russian preposition is sometimes /s/, sometimes /z/?
Why not say that it's always /s/, but is realized as [s] or [z] depending
on the phonetic context?

BTW, do Russian speakers ever write <3> for an /s/ realized as [z]?
