ah/ awe

[Tom Zurinskas]

>From: Beverly Flanigan <flanigan at OHIO.EDU>

>I'll get you a couple of citations when I'm back in my office
>tomorrow.  But you must also give us citations.  What are these dyslexia
>studies you're referencing?  I don't think dyslexia has anything to do with
>the "alphabetic principal" (and I assume you mean principle?).

The alphabetical principle is that letters and letter combinations stand for
sounds.  Stanovich 2000 did a large study on languages.  He found double the
dyslexia in countries speaking English versus phonetically consistent
spelled languages such as Italian.  His conclusion is that non-phonetically
spelled languages "causes" 50% of the dyslexia in English speaking
countries.

>Similarly,
>the 60% awe-usage you cite is from the Vaux web survey, I assume?  Not a
>scientific study, by a long shot!
Nonsense.


>As for the studies you want me to do, I
>assure you that linguists have done many such studies, and they
>consistently show that ah/awe mergers _can't_ hear the difference and can
>produce (i.e., imitate) a difference only with difficulty.
People here say they can hear the difference.  They are just habituated
differently.

>And for
>heaven's sake, top of the line recording and analyzing equipment has been
>standard in our field for a long long time!  (What field are you in, by the
>way???)
Why do you think I was intimating that it wasn't?  Now it appears you have
an attitude.  I'm a retired FAA Employee whos written a few books on USA
English phonetics - via truespel.


>As for uniting linguists in any kind of quest to "perfect" the language,
>fuhgetaboudit!  Unlike English teachers and speech therapists, we're not in
>the business of telling people how to speak or write or spell.
OK.  Thanks for clearing that up.  Please telll me who is and I'll not deal
with linguists anymore.  If I were on a quest to standardize USA English
pronunciation, where would I go?


>As someone
>else suggested, you might want to take a linguistics course sometime; even
>an introductory undergraduate course would clear up a lot of your
>misconceptions about what language is and what linguists do.
Indeed.  If linguists aren't relevant to what we've been discussing, I do
wonder what they do.

Tom Z

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