British Dialects Book

[Dennis R. Preston]

>Ifd "pron" means "collection of codes and/or symbols to represent
>phonemes in computational arrays" it must be handy for you. I  only
>reisted callng thigs which have good anmes something else.


Dennis

>I wrote:
>
>#>/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.
>
>On Mon, 23 Sep 2002, Dennis R. Preston wrote:
>
>#>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.
>
>Uh? Actually, what we used as a pron for "hi" (and "high") was something
>like    hI      , adapting the pre-Windows IBM-PC code page 437
>character set for our symbols. And that is a phonemically-spelled word.
>Two phonemes:
>         h
>         I, representing the diphthong aI with primary stress
>
>You may not like the term. I'm not telling you to use it. We found it
>indispensable, and when Lernout & Hauspie bought Dragon their people
>adopted it eagerly.
>
>-- Mark A. Mandel

--
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