John Cowan wrote:

>
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> > The reflection pairing p and f, b and v might have been featural, but he
> > fails to apply it to the other stop/fricative pairs.
>
> The pairing is not reflection but rotation. It irrationally pairs
> y/w and h/ng, but otherwise is perfect.

As the website we were sent to, the rotations are voicing and one of the
reflections is stop/fricative.

> > (Of course, Shaw wasn't interested in a phonetic alphabet per se; he
> > wanted to impose RP on all the stupid people who spoke non-RP dialects
> > all over Britain (or maybe just England, or maybe the world).
>
> This is nonsense, I'm afraid. Shaw's views on the quality of non-RP
> speech, especially General American, are amply on record. He even
> tried to get the BBC to say /'keInaIn/ instead of /k{n@.../ for
> "canine".

The very first time I have an opportunity to shoehorn it into a
publication, I will provide extensive quotations from his Preface to
Richard Albert Wilson's *The Miraculous Birth of Language* (1941).
Wilson was Professor of English Language and Literature in the
University of Saskatchewan (and his little book is of course a mass of
nonsense), and Shaw's name is a lot more eye-catching on the dust
jacket.

I don't know if it's even included in his "collected prefaces," since
it's not to one of his plays, and I suppose some day I'll check out the
preface to Pygmalion, but that was back in 1914 when he was young and
callow ... by '41, perhaps, he didn't feel he had to be "nice."
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...