Replace [A:] with [a:].

Why should I?

Former editions of Siebs had and other dictionaries have [a] and [A:]

"Brian M. Scott" <b.sc...@csuohio.edu> wrote in messagenews:q919c9hvx4gl.1j25svywwcd10.dlg@40tude.net...

On Sat, 19 Apr 2008 20:05:59 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
which except for the (new) OED, isn't IPA. (Has IPA been
inflicted on the whole family of smaller Oxford
dictionaries?)
One may hope.

IPA forces one to choose an accent.

complications for words like 'pure', 'bomb'. 'cloth' and 'past'?

that words like 'plastic' and 'dog' may be insoluble, but the old OED scheme
with breves, macrons and slurs did a good job of covering multiple accents,
frequently without resorting to respelling.

Also, IPA dates as pronunciations change.

'v' is traditionally misused for a central vowel.

Richard.

For languages with more complicated spelling systems, general
dictionaries, both bilingual and monolingual, usually cover
pronunciation.

Harlan Messinger wrote:

See my other post: "sonstigen" vs. "einsteigen".

What's the purpose? LSD'll just merrily tell you that those can be
deduced from sonst and steigen.

On Sat, 19 Apr 2008 20:05:59 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"

which except for the (new) OED, isn't IPA. (Has IPA been
inflicted on the whole family of smaller Oxford
dictionaries?)

One may hope.

"Brian M. Scott" <b.scott@csuohio.edu> wrote in message
news:q919c9hvx4gl.1j25svywwcd10.dlg@40tude.net...

On Sat, 19 Apr 2008 20:05:59 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"

which except for the (new) OED, isn't IPA. (Has IPA been
inflicted on the whole family of smaller Oxford
dictionaries?)

One may hope.

IPA forces one to choose an accent.

Doesn't that produce unnecessary complications for words
like 'pure', 'bomb'. 'cloth' and 'past'?

Helmut Richter <hhr-m@web.de> wrote:
Replace [A:] with [a:].

Why should I?

Because it is commonly used in dictionaries and probably represents
the actual sound as well.

benli...@ihug.co.nz> wrote in message

news:bf7ef403-3e71-4ad5-9b75-e09c6967872b@z24g2000prf.googlegroups.com...

On Apr 28, 12:50 pm, "Richard Wordingham" <jrw0...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
IPA forces one to choose an accent.
I assume we are talking here about an IPA-based _phonemic_
representation. I don't think any dictionary (even the "Pronouncing
Dictionaries") tries to provide full phonetic detail.
In this sense, one is forced to choose an accent only insofar as there
are phonemic differences in the pronunciation of a word. This applies
to the old annotated-spelling system as much as to IPA. You can either
stick to a single norm, or list variants. Where the variation is
systematic (as in loss of postvocalic /r/) the traditional spelling
does function as a kind of pan-dialectal representation, but it's easy
enough to do this in IPA too.

See remark on bastardisation below.

'bomb' ?? Are you talking about the 'bum' pronunciation (given as an
alternative in OED Online, but not mentioned in any other source I've
looked at, and previously unknown to me)? Or the American variation
between -a- and -o- type vowels in this and many other words. I don't
see that either system handles either problem neatly.

I was thinking of the latter. Are you saying that there is too much
selectional variation in these words?

'cloth' : vs. 'clawth'? My COD (7th ed) lists them as alternatives. If
you tried to subsume them under a modified spelling, it would work for
'broth', but not for 'moth' or 'Goth'.

Enlighten me. What's the difficulty?

Etymology captures the variation by writing /klɔ̀þ/ but /mɔþ/, which is
bastardised IPA.

'past'. COD respells this with -ah-. You could account for a lot of
these words by using trad spelling with an interpretation rule that
says that, in certain environments, both /&/ and /a:/ pronunciations
exist. But you would have to list exceptions (plastic, lass, mass,
molasses...), and in any case this is no simpler than a similar rule
applied to an IPA representation.

I have a version of Chambers that handles this with 'â'. 'Plastic' is a bit
of a problem because the first vowel gets lengthened by some people.

Note that the annotated spelling system will need other interpretation
rules, e.g. to explain that <ar> with ligature in 'farce' sounds the
same as <ah> in 'grass'. or that ligatured <ir>, <er>, and <ur> in
'first', 'terse' and 'curse' all sound the same, unless you're
Scottish.

That's the difference between use by a native speaker and by a non-native
speaker.

with) <ar>, <er>, <ir> and <ur> as being the sounds in 'farce', 'terse',
'first' and 'curse' works very well for native speakers.

an IPA system is that it will say that 'farce' and 'grass' rhyme if it is
based on RP or similar.

Also, IPA dates as pronunciations change.
Not unless there are phonemic changes, in which case both systems
will date.

Isn't /�/ for Maori <wh> unnatural when the typical pronunciation is now
more like [f]?

You then have to anchor the phonemes by reference to particular words. The
vowels of British 'moat' and non-rhotic British 'bare' are particular
cases - 'IPA' actually becomes just the script for another writing system.

It's bad enough that the inverted
'v' is traditionally misused for a central vowel.

I think this is a particularly sad case of IPA symbols effectively coming to
be used arbitrarily.

On Mon, 28 Apr 2008 23:19:44 GMT, Richard Wordingham
jrw0...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in
news:kYsRj.60164$h65.17882@newsfe2-gui.ntli.net> in
sci.lang:

[...]

Isn't /turned-w/ for Maori <wh> unnatural when the typical
pronunciation is now more like [f]?

I've never seen it described as turned-w; I understood it to
be [P], with [f] encroaching.

You then have to anchor the phonemes by reference to
particular words. The vowels of British 'moat' and
non-rhotic British 'bare' are particular cases - 'IPA'
actually becomes just the script for another writing
system.

How so? In what way are /@U/ and /E@/ misleading?

[...]

Brian

On Apr 28, 12:50 pm, "Richard Wordingham" <jrw0...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

IPA forces one to choose an accent.

I assume we are talking here about an IPA-based _phonemic_
representation. I don't think any dictionary (even the "Pronouncing
Dictionaries") tries to provide full phonetic detail.
In this sense, one is forced to choose an accent only insofar as there
are phonemic differences in the pronunciation of a word. This applies
to the old annotated-spelling system as much as to IPA. You can either
stick to a single norm, or list variants. Where the variation is
systematic (as in loss of postvocalic /r/) the traditional spelling
does function as a kind of pan-dialectal representation, but it's easy
enough to do this in IPA too.

'bomb' ?? Are you talking about the 'bum' pronunciation (given as an
alternative in OED Online, but not mentioned in any other source I've
looked at, and previously unknown to me)? Or the American variation
between -a- and -o- type vowels in this and many other words. I don't
see that either system handles either problem neatly.

'cloth' : vs. 'clawth'? My COD (7th ed) lists them as alternatives. If
you tried to subsume them under a modified spelling, it would work for
'broth', but not for 'moth' or 'Goth'.

'past'. COD respells this with -ah-. You could account for a lot of
these words by using trad spelling with an interpretation rule that
says that, in certain environments, both /&/ and /a:/ pronunciations
exist. But you would have to list exceptions (plastic, lass, mass,
molasses...), and in any case this is no simpler than a similar rule
applied to an IPA representation.

Note that the annotated spelling system will need other interpretation
rules, e.g. to explain that <ar> with ligature in 'farce' sounds the
same as <ah> in 'grass'. or that ligatured <ir>, <er>, and <ur> in
'first', 'terse' and 'curse' all sound the same, unless you're
Scottish.

Also, IPA dates as pronunciations change.

Not unless there are phonemic changes, in which case both systems
will date.

It's bad enough that the inverted
'v' is traditionally misused for a central vowel.

Isn't /turned-w/ for Maori <wh> unnatural when the typical
pronunciation is now more like [f]?

You then have to anchor the phonemes by reference to
particular words. The vowels of British 'moat' and
non-rhotic British 'bare' are particular cases - 'IPA'
actually becomes just the script for another writing
system.

Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
On 2008-04-21 15:32:30 +0200, António Marques <m.ap@sapo.pt> said:

p.numminen@suomi24.fi wrote:

Are there words in Spanish whose pronunciation is not
predictable from their orthography? How many?

I cannot know that without a pronouncing dictionary.

Of course you can. You only need open any grammar which will tell
you that 'spanish is pronounced as it is written' in order to know
that. I suppose finnish isn't very different.

Also, spanish phonetics are simple enough that no situations like
the german one where <st> can be st- [St] or -s t- [st] seem to
occur.

What you say is plainly true of Spanish, whatever regional variant
one wants, but something I've sometimes wondered is how far it
applies to Portuguese.

I think the situation with portuguese is similar to the one with german.

People who know Spanish but not Portuguese tend to find pronuncation
of the latter, especially in Portugal, completely bizarre. Is that
just because they don't know the rules, or are the rules more ambiguous
than they are Spanish?

The rules aren't very ambiguous, but there are important differences,
mostly derived from the fact that portuguese phonetics is much more complex:

- Portuguese has nine vowel phonemes, *not* coutning the nasal versions
of some of them: a, @, e, E, i, +, o, O, u.

- Unstressed vowels are generally very much reduced

- Vowel sandhi is omnipresent

- Vowels always interact with nasals, e.g. em > [@~j]

and in -ão one could also count the ~ as a stress mark, as
is the case in manhã etc.

NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO,

NO, NO, NO, NO, the tilde is NOT a stress mark.

My earliest recollection of you is precisely you trying to prove that
the tilde works as a stress mark, at least in some words. (Namely, in
those words in which it coincides with stress.)

In 'manha~' the tilde looks like a stress marker because the word is
stressed on the last syllable and there is no other marker. There is no
other marker because it would have to be placed over the tilde, which
isn't very aesthetic. It's simpler to add words ending in -V~ to the
list above (in which I forgot to include -z).

There is another rule that makes -om oxytone. It's seldom relevant these
days, of course. I didn't mean to present the whole set of rules, of
course, just to illustrate why portuguese spelling must be more complex
than that of spanish.

There are different ways of describing the same rules (...)

Of course there are; that applies to every set of rules in the universe.
What matters is that a certain set is economical, consistent and elegant
so that users have the least effort acquiring it.

Making the tilde sometimes a stress marker and sometimes not (whilst
moreover gaining nothing in the process) would go against the
fundamental principle ingrained in everyone's mind that a diacritic, in
portuguese, can either mark stress (´, ^) or it can't (`, ~).

In general, I'd say that you have to have a command of portuguese
phonotaxis to know how to pronounce written words unambiguously, and
even then there are exceptions. It's not like in english, but it isn't
like in spanish either. To have it the spanish way we'd need a handful
more of vowels in the alphabet; the 'solution' presented in Ruud's
linked book doesn''t cut it; it's tied to a specific dialect (for which
by the way it is no longer adequate) /

As that really so? That 1878 spelling (as used in the book, don't know
about what they propose) seemed to correspond nicely to the current
standard pronunciation, even when considering both Portugal and
Brazil.

The element that automatically springs to mind is eic- for exc-, but I
think I saw others. And what should one do with free variation?

In what regards 'standard pronunciation', my impression is that your
view of its psychological role is tainted by the realities in countries
with more dialectal variation. To give you an example, you might suppose
that, if tomorrow it were decreed that -elh- would start being written
-âlh- (reflecting the pronounciation one finds in Lisbon), people from
other dialects wouldn't mind it much more than people from Lisbon, since
it would be a matter of representing the 'standard', and the Lisbon can
lay claim to the 'standard', so people from outside wouldn't be
concerned anyway. However, that is not so. That -elh- is expected to
represent a number of varieties. The 'standard' is expected to encompass
most of them, within some limits. Just what those limits are is mostly
tied to muutal comprehension of fast speech.

I don't think everyone is supposed to pronounce 'standard german'
precisely the same way, but some people from other countries seem to
think that that is the case with 'standard portuguese', and that
'standard portuguese' is the variety spoken is Lisbon (which one?). If
there is a thing called 'standard portuguese', it is strongly ties to
the written forms. That means it may distinguish between 'rio' and
'riu', which some varieties sometimes taken as the 'standard' don't.

People who do care about such things as a 'standard' here in this
country are more concerned with questions such as should 'espectadores'
have a /k/ or not than with how laminal or not should the /s/ be.

and leaves the important parts as
they are, even if it mangles morphology.

Yes. It proposes "mudal-a" instead of "mudá-la".

The [l] mostly belonging to the syllable following it, this one is
particularly disingenious.

Considering the probable history
mudarla > mudala

Yes.

not
mudarla > mudar-a > muda-la
the current spelling seems better.

In fact, all it does is to mark
the difference between open and closed vowels (the part that Ruud
cherishes because he already knows the rest), and introduce some
'consistency' at the expense of diasystemic morphophonology (e.g. using
ãi for ãe).

Yes. (But cf. Góis, which is still written Goes on old cornerstones in
the area. Piódão used to be Piodam.)

-ói- is usually written with ´, though one common exception is comboio.

Surnames can use old spellings if that usage has been continuous.

Incidentally, to my ears Brazilian Portuguese is noticeably less
baffling than Portuguese Portuguese, and I've heard similar opinions
from many Latin American Spanish speakers.

On one occasion in Lisbon my
wife was talking (in Spanish) to some Brazilians who said that they had
great difficulty understanding what people in Lisbon said to them. Is
it simply that unstressed vowels are more reduced in Portugal than they
are in Brazil?

and in -ão one could also count the ~ as a stress mark, as
is the case in manhã etc.
NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO,

snip> <snip> <snip> <snip> !!!! (;-)

NO, NO, NO, NO, the tilde is NOT a stress mark.

My earliest recollection of you is precisely you trying to prove that
the tilde works as a stress mark, at least in some words. (Namely, in
those words in which it coincides with stress.)

Exactly. In other words (with the same effect):
~ is always a stressmark, except in three VERY RARE (and very clear
and recognizable) situations:

1) When a 'stronger' stress mark ' or ^ overrides it. Example: sótão,
bênção.

2) For morphological reasons, when suffixes are added. Examples:
mãozinho, manhãzinha.

3) Composite words, indicated with a hyphen: mão-de-obra, mão-cheia,
mão-posta etc.