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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Norewgian (and Swedish) vowels
In-Reply-To: sslyjim@ucl.ac.uk's message of Tue, 15 Nov 1994 11:46:13 GMT
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References: <HFI9AB.94Nov4153258@vkhdib01.hda.hydro.com> <39g2dq$34v@ugle.unit.no>
	<HFI9AB.94Nov8184430@vkhdib01.hda.hydro.com>
	<1994Nov15.114613.27901@ucl.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 1994 19:03:42 GMT
Lines: 44

In article <1994Nov15.114613.27901@ucl.ac.uk> sslyjim@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Jim Tyson)
writes:

>In article <HFI9AB.94Nov8184430@vkhdib01.hda.hydro.com>
>hfi9ab@vkhdib01.hda.hydro.com (Anders Blehr) writes:

>>The problem is that French [u] and Norwegian [y] cannot both be IPA [y].

>Many a slip between phoneme and phone!  There is no "French" [u] but a French
>/u/, no "Norwegian" [y] but a Norwegian /y/.  Since the /u/ and /y/ are
>_phonemes_ and not phones they only approximate to their IPA homographs.
>Since variation is rife in most languages it is unlikely that there can be any
>one to one relation between phonemic and phonetic systems of transcription.  I
>have no idea whether "standard" French /u/ is for most speakers closer to IPA
>[Y] or [y] but since it will vary from speaker to speaker and context to
>context I can see no reason not to use either symbol systematically to
>represent the phonological system of standard French.

To quote an old Charlie Daniels song, "Now, just wait a minute, Jim."

Don't confuse orthography, phonology, and phonetics.  There *is* a French [u],
spelt <ou>, as well as a French [y], spelt <u>.  These reflect the phonemes /u/
and /y/ of the French language.

Further, the IPA includes not only signs for various segmentable portions of
the continuous speech signal, but diacritics for indicating such things as
"higher than the standard," "more fronted than the standard," and so on.  The
issue is whether one is interested in a broader or narrower transcription of
the speech stream.  Thus, depending on the intention of the transcriber--which
will be stated in any reasonable paper--the grapheme <y> from the IPA may very
well be used for either the sound in French or the sound in Norwegian, with
diacritics as necessary.

The purpose of the IPA is, after all, not to provide an individual symbol for
each possible speech sound in every language on the planet, but to provide an
agreed upon conventional set of symbols which are of the greatest utility in
representing the highly diverse sounds of human language in such a way that
anyone trained in its use will have a good chance of comprehending the sound
systems of the languages in question.
-- 
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_
