Talk:International Phonetic Alphabet for English/Archive 2

message: Angr reverted the inclusion of the 2nd [aj] phone with the statement "[@I] is an allophone not a phoneme". However, this is not entirely true. In most US English ("most" in the geographical sense, anyway), these are distinct phonemes, although only marginally so. Like the velar vs. palatal fricatives in German, there are few minimal pairs. One is
:rider 
:writer 
For people who flap their alveolars stops, the distinction is entirely in the vowel. Even if you chose to transcribe the distinction as one of length, there are still two [aj] phonemes. kwami 18:37, 2005 July 25 (UTC)
:The surface distinction may be entirely in the vowel, but the phonemic distinction is entirely in the consonant: rider  vs. writer . Just because (in rule-based terms) flapping counterbleeds raising, that doesn't mean there's a phonemic distinction between  and . --Angr/ 20:06, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: There are lots of theoretical ways of achieving this kind of opacity; I gave the rule-based one as an example, although if I were writing a paper on this myself I would certainly use Optimality Theory and output-output faithfulness; someone else might use sympathy theory. That a legislative rider is semantically disassociated from ride doesn't matter, because rider is the one that has the vowel we'd expect before a flap. Only a meaning of writer that was semantically disconnected from write would be evidence for (but still not proof of) a phonemic split into  and , but even then since flapping is optional in American English ( is not ungrammatical in AmE), there would still be evidence that such an independent meaning of writer had underlying . And I do think this is an important phenomenon of English phonology that deserves to be reported on, but not here. This should be discussed at English phonology, not on a page that's supposed to be on how to use the IPA to represent English. --Angr/ 21:41, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  the two [aj] sounds 

message: Anyone interested in adding short audio clips as a learning aid?  Gchriss 17:32, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Audio clips? 

message: Does anyone care to add Canadian English to this article?  There are many differences from U.S., but I think they're too subtle for me to try to document here.  —Michael Z. 2005-08-27 16:59 Z
: I could possibly do it, if nobody else wants to.--Sonjaaa 19:03, August 27, 2005 (UTC)
:: I'll pitch in where I can, or do a first draft of additions to the table, anticipating your corrections and additions.  —Michael Z. 2005-08-28 01:40 Z
I'm agin it. This page is not the place to discuss the differences between dialects of English. There are plenty of other pages where that can be discussed (e.g. North American English, Canadian English). The focus of this page should be on how the IPA is used in pronunciation guides of Wikipedia articles and should be kept simple. --Angr/ 18:41, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Canadian English 

message: Well, no one has objected, so I'm replacing the content of this page with the content of User:Angr/IPA for English (proposal). --Angr/ 08:27, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  New content 

message: If this is the appropriate place for simple line art images depicting tongue, lip, teeth and mouth positions for all the phoneme parts, will someone please create some and add them here? (or find a licence compatible source and import them)
Such as http://www.sk.com.br/mouth-th.gif for "th" sound in the, thirty, them, Thursday, and the like.
Thanks - Scott Edwards
:I don't think this article is the appropriate place for such images. Place of articulation has a general picture of the vocal tract. Perhaps the articles on individual sounds, like Voiceless postalveolar fricative, would be improved by line drawings of how they're produced. --Angr/ 06:12, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  graphic representations of mouth and tongue posistions 

message: I can't see most of the IPA symbols on this wiki page.  I'm using IE 6 and have encoding set to Unicode (UTF-8).  2005-10-21 18:59:00 (PST)
:That's annoying, because they all use the  template, which was supposed to solve the problem of people using IE. All I can suggest is use a different browser! --Angr/ 02:18, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Encoding and fonts