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Dan's point about the drive towards similarity/cateogrisation
IPA is a valuable one in this discussion. One major reason why this has become a
long discussion is that IPA symbology/categories muddy the waters for many
people: the categories themselves aren't the problem though, but rather the fact
that linguists often get stuck in them rather than observing properly and being
interested in variation.
There's little (beyond the linguistic preference
for categorical perception) that stops a good phonetician from
observing/describing a fair amount of phonetic variation (even with the IPA as
*one* of the tools), so I was surprised to see Bob discounting traditional
phonetic observation. Sure, within-speaker and between-speaker variation are not
going to be as precisely accessible as experimental methods *sometimes* permit,
but without the initial careful observation by decent phoneticians, many
questions for experimental investigation wouldn't
arise.
Duncan
--
Dr Duncan
Markham
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