Rick McCallister wrote (responding to my clarification of PAN *e = schwa):
> So, it from the usage in Bahasa Indonesia? where e is schwa
No, as I mentioned in my post, it began (in AN linguistics, at least in the
US) back in typewriter days (manual ones at that), when a machine with any
foreign not to mention IPA characters was rare and expensive. Actually, I
believe it was Isidore Dyen who first proposed it in the early 50s, along
with several other changes to Otto Dempwolff's original 1930s system (which
did use the schwa character and others that didn't work on US keyboards).
Probably due to Prof. Dyen's prestige in the field, his system has become
the standard. Personally I don't like it, as it can cause great confusion
when dealing with the modern languages, most of which have acquired [e] (and
[o]) from loanwords and/or regular sound change.
In the earliest days and up to about Independence in 1947, Dutch and
Indonesian writers used e-breve for schwa, and "e" for [e]. Perfectly
rational. When Bahasa Indonesia was codified (and perhaps because of the
typewriter problem), they switched to "e" for schwa (it's very common) and
"é" e-acute for [e] (rather rare). Also rational. In 1972 there was a
spelling reform, and I guess someone on the committee disapproved of
diacritics, because they fixed a system that wasn't broken: e-acute was
abandoned, and now "e" represents both schwa and [e]. Makes it difficult for
learners, or when encountering unfamiliar words.
While on the subject: I've noticed that most writers here use & for schwa
because of the a-circle problem. Seems as good as anything, as long as we're
consistent. (But in one of the ASCII-ified SAMPAs, I believe, & represents
low-front æ (ae lig.)-- so there's a little room for confusion, though not
in discussing PIE. Also in SAMPA, as I recall, "6" represents IPA
inverted-a, a low-central vowel-- Patrick's use of it gave me pause for a
moment, but it became clear enough what he meant.........)
Allow me to mention that some mail-lists I belong to enforce a quite strict
"No cross, no crown" policy-- i.e. no religion, no politics. It helps to
keep the dialogue on a reasonable level, so that things don't degenerate
into chat-room flame-storms. One might include "no overly personal remarks",
but of course that doesn't happen here on Cybalist ;-)