18.2302, Qs: Need for Rhotacized Vowels

[LINGUIST Network]

LINGUIST List: Vol-18-2302. Thu Aug 02 2007. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 18.2302, Qs: Need for Rhotacized Vowels

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>
 
Reviews: Randall Eggert, U of Utah  
         <reviews at linguistlist.org> 

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, 
and donations from subscribers and publishers.

Editor for this issue: Dan Parker <dan at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  

We'd like to remind readers that the responses to queries are usually
best posted to the individual asking the question. That individual is
then strongly encouraged to post a summary to the list. This policy was
instituted to help control the huge volume of mail on LINGUIST; so we
would appreciate your cooperating with it whenever it seems appropriate.

In addition to posting a summary, we'd like to remind people that it
is usually a good idea to personally thank those individuals who have
taken the trouble to respond to the query.

To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at
http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html.

===========================Directory==============================  

1)
Date: 01-Aug-2007
From: Sherri Condon < scondon at mitre.org >
Subject: Need for Rhotacized Vowels

 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 02 Aug 2007 10:51:40
From: Sherri Condon [scondon at mitre.org]
Subject: Need for Rhotacized Vowels
E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=18-2302.html&submissionid=152743&topicid=8&msgnumber=1  


My colleagues and I are working on sound/spelling correspondences, and we
find that for our purposes, it works better not to represent English
sequences like ''er'' in ''letter'' and ''or'' in ''work'' as [?] and [?],
but as [?r] and [?r].  We're trying to decide whether we can eliminate the
rhotacized vowels from our tools altogether, but we are working with
languages other than English and would like the tools to be general enough
to work with any language.

So my question is whether anyone knows of a language for which treating
rhotacized vowels as described above would be a problem.  An example would
be a language that has rhotacized phonemes and uses script characters to
represent those phonemes that are distinct from the characters used to
represent V + /r/.  For our purposes, languages with scripts that do not
reflect pronunciation (like Chinese) are not a concern.

We appreciate being able to consult the collective wisdom of LINGUIST! 

Linguistic Field(s): Phonetics
                     Phonology
                     Writing Systems





-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-18-2302