22.4495, Qs: Seeking recent phonemic neutralizations

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LINGUIST List: Vol-22-4495. Thu Nov 10 2011. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 22.4495, Qs: Seeking recent phonemic neutralizations

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1)
Date: 10-Nov-2011
From: Andrew Wedel [wedel at u.arizona.edu]
Subject: Seeking recent phonemic neutralizations


-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:40:38
From: Andrew Wedel [wedel at u.arizona.edu]
Subject: Seeking recent phonemic neutralizations

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We are collecting a database of diachronically recent phonemic 
neutralizations (mergers or deletions) in languages for which there 
exist reasonably good corpora and associated word-lists. The 
neutralizations can be context-sensitive or context-free, but for our 
purposes, the neutralization needs to be complete in some dialect of 
the language. The corpus needs to have a phonemic transcription (or 
the orthography needs to be shallow enough that we can reconstruct 
one); it needs to encode the pre-neutralization state of the language 
either in the phonemic transcription or the orthography; and it needs to 
reflect (other than the neutralization) the phonemic system of the 
dialect in which the neutralization has taken place. As an example, for 
the LOT~THOUGHT and PIN~PEN mergers that have taken place in 
varieties of American English, we can use an American English 
phonemic transcription of the English portion of the CELEX database. 
To see a regularly updated list of the neutralizations and associated 
corpora that we currently have, please point your browser to 

http://tinyurl.com/8y7pgpe 

We currently have neutralizations in English, German, Dutch, French, 
Slovak, Korean and Hong Kong Cantonese. If you have any 
suggestions for additions to this list, please contact Andy Wedel at 
wedel at u.arizona.edu 

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics
                     Phonetics
                     Phonology





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