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From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Problems (was Re: The phonemic transcription problem)
In-Reply-To: exw6sxq@ix.netcom.com's message of Tue, 30 Jul 1996 12:00:28 GMT
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Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 18:45:06 GMT
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Ther are actually two *unrelated* problems here:  The *phonetic* (not phonemic)
transcription problem, and the *phonemic assignment* problem.

The first, the problem of phonetic transcription, is indeed only solvable in
the way desired by Bob Cunningham.  It is how all of us linguists learned to do
phonetic transcriptions:  We spent at least one academic term/quarter/semester
in a class with someone who already knew the meanings of the symbols in the IPA
who most likely also got speakers of languages in which sounds occurred which
were not native to the language of instruction.  When I studied phonetics with
Lehiste (name dropping), we had among others Cretan Greek (for prenasalised
stops and palatalised liquids), Korean (for unreleased stops), Ibibio (for
velar/labial doubly articulated stops), and Japanese (for unrounded high back
vowels, bilabial fricatives, and unvoiced vowels).

The idea of cardinal vowels, by the bye, is unrelated to the IPA, although they
both are important.  When the cardinal vowels are taught, it is (we were told)
traditional to list the genealogy by which they came to us.  (I learned them
from Ilse Lehiste who learned them from Peter Ladefoged who learned them from
Daniel Jones, whose idea they were.)

The second is both easier and harder:  One need not know the *exact* pronuncia-
tion for phonemic assignment, as long as native speakers of the dialect under
study agree unconsciously that "X sounds like Y", which can be tested by the
researcher by substituting different allophones intentionally:  As long as the
native speaker thinks only that the researcher has "a funny accent" and does
not react strongly, the assignment of different allophones to one phoneme is
reasonable.

It is harder because no two researchers ever agree on the assignments of the
marginal cases...
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
