Re[10]: ka and k^a [was: [tied] *kW- "?"]

At 10:45:03 PM on Friday, September 23, 2005, Patrick Ryan
wrote:

> Perhaps you are not aware of it, but many systems for
> phonetic rendition of English have been used in the past
> besides IPA.

I could hardly fail to be aware of it, since my first
linguistics textbook was Gleason.

> In those, <æ> was used for the openest English front
> vowel, as in <hat>;

Which is consistent with IPA usage: that vowel is higher
than (IPA) [a]. (Gleason in fact explicitly recognizes
this, classifying his /æ/ as upper low and his /a/ as low.)

> and <a> was reserved for the central vowel of <father>.

Indeed; with a range from a somewhat centralized [a] all the
way to [A]. This is perfectly reasonable for phonemic
transcription at least of U.S. English, which in general
does not distinguish [a] and [A]; it's less satisfactory
outside that context, which probably explains why, for
instance, Bloch and Trager used <a> and <æ> in a manner
consistent with IPA usage.

Brian