Toby Bartels wrote:
David Friedland wrote about morphophones:
And it seems like a panacea for the pronunciation
problem. But it's not,
because some words simply have different underlying representations in
different dialects, and the system only works for dialects that are
roughly the same except for a few sound changes. It fails for wildly or
even mildly divergent dialects. The American Heritage Dictionary system
sweeps this problem under the rug by saying "The pronunciations are
exclusively those of educated speech", which, to my mind, is a cop-out,
and not a satisfactory solution for Wikipedia.
How do you mean that morphophones fail for mildly divergent dialects?
What is your reason for thinking such a thing?
Surely not that the American Heritage Dictionary didn't take much effort?
I already said that these dictionaries have unsophisticated systems.
The AHD states its limitations: educated American speech only.
This allows them to cut corners on their implementation.
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?
However, I do
not know of any system
advocated by linguists other than what phonologists call "broad
transcription" using IPA. Can you point me to a book or paper, written
by linguists, that specifies such a system for English, and advocates
its use by and for general (non-academic) readers?
I've cited the original 1962 paper introducing morphophones before;
I'd have to look up the citation in the archives to repeat it,
but you're already going through those so I'll refrain for now.
But that was an academic paper; what I should do now
is try to track down a more recent (1980s) book that I've read,
written by linguists, which advocates its use outside academic settings.
OK. I'd be really interested to learn how the above problem is solved.
I have never
encoutered such a system, and I doubt that one exists.
Barring the existence of a standard system, I don't really see that
Wikipedia has any other options besides IPA for specifying
pronunciations. Certainly I hope no one thinks Wikipedia should invent
its own system. When it comes to standards, it should be our job to
follow them and describe them, not create them.
I'm not sure to what extent there is a /single/ standard system.
There certainly is at least one system in use by linguists.
Probably with variations due to improved understanding over time,
but whether these are coordinated by a single standards body I don't know.
I will try to track this down too.
- David [[User:Nohat]]