All 40 USA English phonemes (Was Re: Eggcorn? "warn" > "worn")

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 12:17 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> And, to be fair, the problem isn't really with the inadequacies of
> qwerty keyboards, which are real but not necessarily decisive in all
> cases of desired precision.  The ASCII-ized IPA, limited as it may
> be, has no problem distinguishing _haeN at r_ from _aeNg at r_ or _s at n_
> from _s at N_.  It's the old biuniqueness issue, and the phonemic
> principle.

Or with the Kirshenbaumian system (which preserves a one-to-one
phoneme-to-grapheme mapping when possible): /h&N at r/ vs. /&Ng at r/.


--Ben Zimmer

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