The CBB

There again, there are some contrastive counter-examples, such as "idea" and "onomatopoeia," listed in Cambridge respectively as /aɪˈdɪə/ and /ˌɒnəˌmætəˈpiːə/. I would guess the most common realisation the historically centring diphthong is /iːə/ (when carefully recited), or /ɪː...

There is definitely some predictability there, but I just don't think it's quite predictable enough to justify what you're suggesting, as shown by the near-minimal pair I gave above: /niːl/ ("kneel") versus /ɹɪəl/ ("real"), or even better, /niːl/ ("kneel") versus /mɪəl...

As for /Vr/ The reason we should treat "broad" (pre-rhotic) vowels as special cases of short/checked vowels, or as special cases of long/free vowels, is that they historically evolved from long vowels, and that this is reflected in the current orthography. It's much better to keep the cur...

The rhotic combinations /ɑɹ/ or /ɑ˞/ and /ɔɹ/ or /ɔ˞/ are treated mostly as holistic units of their own, just like the other two, /ɜ˞/ and /ə˞/. This is due, at least in part, to a broad distributional rule that allows the reduction of diacritic usage. If they were subject to the normal checked/fre...

Non-native students, at least in the beginning, are much less likely to have the same intuitions about the rarity of certain sound combinations as opposed to others. Even native children may not have them to the extent that you seem to presume. I'm not presuming that people have any kind of intuiti...

You can hear a phoneme. You can't hear a morpheme boundary. I never said anything about "morpheme boundaries" - or "phonemes", for that matter. Laypeople tend not to know what those terms mean - but that doesn't mean they often aren't intuitively aware of this stuff. In fact, un...

Perhaps I should clarify that, while I have tried to generally reduce the number of re-associations foreign learners have to make in mastering pronunciation, I realized almost immediately that eliminating them altogether would be impossible, given the limits of English phonology and the sheer variet...

Would it not make more sense to let the checked <a> represent <æ> rather than /ʌ/? It is true, that in some accents, /ʌ/ and /ɑː/ are distinguished primarily by length - but that's far from universal. In many English dialects, /ʌ/ has a more closed realisation. In some dialects, it's more like a sh...

In my opinion, a much better way of keeping unconventional characters to a minimum would be not introducing them in the first place , considering that we already have a bunch of digraphs that do the job just fine. A word like adulthood is so transparently obviously a combination of adult + hood tha...

There's nothing wrong with <ng>. The ambiguity you bring up is not really that important since I don't think there any words which contrast [ŋ] and [ŋg]. However, adding your distinction brings up new problems. In my dialect <singer> and <finger> both end with [ŋə˞] and there are other dialects tha...

What would you prefer, then, Ossicone? Hopefully not the traditional <ng>, since that would be ambiguous.

(/sɪŋə˞/ versus /fɪŋgə˞/)

<singer> versus <finger> - distinction lostǃ

<sìñør> versus <fingør> - distinction retained!

I came here after being re-directed from "Rite yor wayǃ" in hopes of sharing my own reform scheme, but much to my pleasant surprise, it's already being talked about via the debates on Zompistǃ To answer this latest critique, the re-assignment of a few familiar letters to not-so-familiar so...

As promised, here's my introduction to the Brujeric history and culture, with a brief sample of their language as well. The Brujerics are the central race of witches/warlocks in an epic fantasy tale that's been steadily developing in my head for years now. They're the descendants of Atlantean surviv...

Greetings! My name is Greg, and I'm a graduate student in linguistics at the University of Florida. I have a B.A. in Spanish and a solid foundational knowledge of French, Italian, Latin, German, and classical Greek. As a self-educational hobby, I often translate/adapt song lyrics from one language t...