Richard Wordingham wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Nicholas Bodley" <nbodley@...> wrote:
> > On Sat, 19 Mar 2005 19:18:55 -0500, Richard Wordingham
> > <richard.wordingham@...> wrote:
>
> > > The discussion on Tamil is almost totally invalidated because of a
> > > belief that /hoo/ is encoded <<ee>><<h>><<aa>>.
>
> > [ I see doubled "angle brackets" surrounding transiterated letters and
> > such. I'm wondering why they are doubled; there must be a good reason.]
>
> Amateur linguist at work! Linguists use different brackets to
> indicate at what level they are talking - / / for phonemes (the
> underlying contrasting units in speech), [ ] for phones (the actual
> sounds that emerge), < > for spelling, // // for archiphonemes
> (phonemes except that the context denies the possibility of saying
> precisely which one, as in the lack of contrast between /s//d/ and
> /s//t/ at the start of an English word) and /// /// for morphemes
> (elemental bits of word with meaning, as in <meaning> = ///mean///
> ///ing///). The brackets may be omitted if the context does not
> require it.

Respectively / /, [ ], < > (better Ð ð), | |, { } in traditional
notation.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...