British Dialects Book

[Dennis R. Preston]

>AHA! /h/ and /aI/ are phonemes and /haI/ is a pron. It's not clear
>to me why "pronb" are not phonemically-spelled wods (or morphemes).
>I still find the term unhandy.


dInIs

>On Sat, 21 Sep 2002, Dennis R. Preston wrote:
>
>#>Of course it would. As long as that means yhat nobody pronounces
>#>phonemes (only phones).
>#
>#I don't understand, however, why "phone" and "phoneme" wouldn't do
>#for any speech recognition (or production) computational attempts? I
>#say the phones
>#[ha:], and, if you're good, you build a machine which recognizes the
>#word "hi" on the basis of some sort of pan-dialectal phonemic
>#representation (presumably something like /haI/ which represents the
>#morpheme {hi}. I don't really see the need for a 'pron.'
>
>/h/ is a phoneme. /h 'aI/ is a pron. As you train the program
>initially and continue to use it, the /'aI/ phoneme gets adapted to your
>pronunciation [a:] and the program gets better and better at recognizing
>your speech.
>
>Clearer now?
>
>-- Mark A. Mandel
>    formerly Sr. Linguist, Dragon Systems, speech recognition

--
Dennis R. Preston
Professor of Linguistics
Department of Linguistics and Languages
740 Wells Hall A
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1027 USA
Office - (517) 353-0740
Fax - (517) 432-2736