--- David Friedland <david(a)nohat.net> wrote:
The reasoning behind morphophones is that even
though people speak with
different regional dialects, how the pronunciations
are stored in each
person's internal lexicon in their brain is the
same, or can be
representented symbolically in ways that are
equivalent. The
morphophonic system taps into this internal
consistency between
different dialects and thus a single symbolic form
can represent the
different (but equivalent) pronunciations for
speakers of different
dialects.
For example, in such system we would have a single
symbol for the sound
represented by the final "er" in the word "runner".
A speaker of a
non-rhotic Boston dialect, for example, would then
always produce this
sound as a plain schwa, and a speaker of, say,
standard American would
produce it as a rhoticized schwa. In the
morphophonic system, only a
single pronunciation would be needeed to specify the
two different
pronunciations in result.
The problem with this system is that the fundamental
assumption that
internal representations of pronunciations are
equivalent is false. This
is what I meant by "mildly divergent" dialects.
Besides regular sound
change, dialects also differ in some cases in how
pronunciations are
represented in the lexicon. It is simply the case
that some dialects
have fundamentally different internal
representations for the
pronunciations of some words.
If you don't agree, then how would you specify a
single pronunciation
using a morphophonic system for the words "almond",
"apricot", "aunt",
"controversy", "clerk", "creek", "florida",
"garage", "greasy",
"lieutenant", "mayonnaise", "mischievous",
"pecan",
and "tour", just for
starters? I just don't see how a simple system could
capture all these
variants with a single representation. You're not
advocating a system
that has a symbol that corresponds to /u/ in AmE and
/Ef/ in BrE so that
"lieutenant" is represented with one set of symbols,
are you?
- David [[User:Nohat]]
I'd advocate for such a system. I created a system
that can do just that by writing (oo|ayf). If you
wanted to do almond, you'd write a-|lmi|und. This can
be made slightly less verbose by using accent marks.
The other accents besides US and UK English can just
infer what sound it will make. I think such a system
(although not mine) would work well. I would like to
know what linguists use, though.
LDan
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