--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
<richard.wordingham@m...> wrote:

>
> If the equivalences are good, it does make sense to pair short and
> long vowels off. But the equivalences may not be good, so pairing
> them off may simply be a convenience. A diphthong is essentially a
> changing vowel sound, and there can be problems in identifying the
> precise end points well enough.

I don't understand how the precise position of the end point
matters in how we analyze it phonemically. Sanskrit [e] doesn't
begin in /a/ nor end in /y/ but is nevertheless the realization
of that sequence.

> I think one needs to be pragmatic. A dialect is a collection
> of idiolects, and even these vary over time, and, even more
> inconveniently, with social situation. An analysis as vowel
> sequences can work well, e.g. in Finnish, but work less well
> when there are fewer contrasting sequences.

I was not allowed what I thought to be the pragmatic fiction of
a "shadow" segment, but that's quite alright if we are limiting
ourselves to a rigorous and strictly phonetic analysis, one based
solely on the "audibles". However American English's diachronic
and dialect relationships are just that, extra-phonetic and
inaudible. If /E/ and /e/ are distinct phonemes in some other
dialect, that alone should not influence how they are judged in
mine.

> I think you've just suggested that beat /biit/ would be
> more natural!

I have backed off of the more extreme position merging /i/, /I/
_and_ /j/, since I wasn't entirely sure of it in the first place,
but only for English, not for a stage of Indo-Aryan that still
retained the laryngeal. As I stated before, I'm not an expert
on English, I only speak it, but as a speaker with some interest
in linguistics I can't help but have noticed and wondered about
some things.

> One measure of the suitability of the analysis would be how much
> effort had to be devoted to defining the allophonic variation of
> the vowels in these contexts. The diphthongs you write /aj/
> and /ou/ can be particularly troublesome.

Why? Are you referring to the closer starting points for /aj/
and /aw/ before a voiceless consonant? Where does /ou/ come in?

> There can be significant difficulty in identifying a consistent
> starting point for these diphthongs.

Again, I think that this is a matter of phonetic detail only.
A phoneme has no sound, only its allophones do. I have noticed
that in some dialects of British English where I have /uw/ and
/ow/ they begin with a central or even a front vowel, and it may
well be that such a dialect should represent these as /iw/ and
/ew/, I don't know.

> Is it obvious why you group /e/ with /E/ rather than with /I/?

I don't understand this. /E/ and /e/ are closer and such a
grouping would give /sej/ for 'see' and /sEj/ for 'say'. It
would also destroy the front/back parallelism unless you mean
to group /o/ with /U/ also. What have I misunderstood?

> Well, there is the syllabification issue!

Now here I think you do have something. I can't tell for
certain by ear alone where the syllable boundary is. I've
assumed [si.jiN] and [se.jiN], but if you know different
please tell. Actually in my normal fast unguarded speech
I think that they are closer to [sijN and [sejN], but again
I think that this is all a matter of phonetic detail.

David