Re: Monophthongs in IPA

I suppose I'm the only person on this list to have met A.K. Warder
(?); he still collects his mail if you'd like to write to him.

I'd like to disagree with the suggestion that Warder was intentionally
"Anglicizing" the distinction between long and short vowels.

The theoretical belief that the paried Pali vowels differ only by
duration (not by sound _per se_) is not encountered in practice.  I
believe that Warder's bias would have been his extensive experience
with native speakers of modern Indian langauges, and living Pali
scholars from Sri Lanka.

You must be very careful when checking against examples such as "hut"
vs. "barn" --the European (English) vowel can be radically different
than the American.  An english aristocrat pronounces /barn/ as
"baa-n", whereas a Yankee has a shorter vowel and a hard "r".  The IPA
transcription will be different for British english than in an
american IPA dictionary.  I would assume that Warder was "thinking in
British english" with these examples.

E.M.