Representation
Saul Epstein 
Fri, 20 Mar 1998 12:24:20 -0600

I think it might be useful if we take a moment to consider the
different kinds of things we need to represent in writing with regard
to language. These are a few I can think of.

			PHONES

Phones are speech sounds, whether broadly or narrowly defined, but
which are language-independent. That is, they are defined solely on
the basis of their acoustic (sound) or articulatory (physiological)
characteristics, without regard for the way any particular dialect or
language organizes them. In general, any sound which is possible to
produce in isolation is probably a phone.

There is an International Phonetic Alphabet for representing phones.
The convention is that when a bit of speech is to be represented
phonetically in writing, it is surrounded by square brackets [].

			PHONEMES

Phonemes are language-specific idealizations of that language's basic
sounds. Phonemes are composed of phones which alternate with each
other according to rules which are also specific to the language. The
phones that alternate in the expression of a phoneme are called its
allophones. IPA signs are often used to represent phonemes as well as
phones. To distinguish them, the convention is to surround phonemic
representations of speech with slashes //.

So, for instance, the English word "ink" may be composed of three
phonemes: /i/, /n/, and /k/. The word could be given a phonemic
transcription of /ink/. But its phonetic transcription might be
something like [(i~)(ng)(kh)], where parentheses indicate phones for
which IPA provides a single sign and ASCII doesn't.

			LETTERS

Many languages have writing systems that evolve with varying degrees
of indifference to their language's phonology (phoneme system) or
phonetics (phone system). Another convention calls for speech
represented by such systems to be surrounded by angle-brackets <>.

So, the following are different ways of representing the English word
"incredible."

<incredible>		orthographic (as spelled)
/inkredibl/			phonemic
[(ng|)(kh)(j?)Er*b(l|)]	phonetic (as I hear myself, anyway)


I only mention all this to try to clarify that what I wrote at the
end of my recent "Vowels" message was not intended as yet another
transcription proposal, but merely to represent some _early_,
_tentative_ conclusions about the vowel phonemes of the ZC dialect
based on some new data.

--
from Saul Epstein
locus*planetkc,com
www,johnco,cc,ks,us/~sepstein
"Surak ow'phaaper thes'hi thes'tca'; thes'phaadjar thes'hi
	suraketca'."
							-- K'dvarin Urswhl'at