British Dialects Book

[Mark A Mandel]

On Sat, 21 Sep 2002, Dennis R. Preston wrote:

#A phonemic transcription (or representation) is of a mental cognitive
#fact.  A phonetic transcription tries to capture an
#acoustic/articulatory fact.

Just so.

#"Prons" (a new technical term to me)

Not surprising, it was an in-house term.

#appears to be a not very helpful one which means anything written
#which tries to capture either of these facts.

It was a very helpful term to us for the work of developing and
producing speech recognition software. We needed to distinguish the
actual acoustics of a pronunciation from the ways it was represented
symbolically in our lexicons.

#If I suggested that a phonetic or phonemic representation was itself
#that which it represented, I apologize for that; I assure you I have
#no such philosophical silliness in mind.

I inferred it, but that doesn't mean that you implied it.

Would our apparent differences disappear if "phonemic pronunciation"
were replaced with "phonemic transcription"?

-- Mark A. Mandel