Science and Technology news... :: View topic - Redefining [a] and [æ]? or using a better vowel qua drilater

Sonja Elen Kisa · Guest

The standard trapezoid shape used to map vowel space is traditional,
but I don>t think it>s the most accurate.

Among the other shapes used or proposed, which one is the most helpful
in really showing the vowel space as it really is, either acoustically
or as it is perceived by our ears? Where can I see these? For example,
maybe using tongue height or formants?

An area that has always bothered me is that most people use [a] to
refer to an open central unrounded vowel (instead of open front
unrounded) and then end up using [æ] to represent the open front
unrounded vowel (which should technically be [a]).

At this point, I don>t know if it would be more helpful for IPA to
officially redefine [a] as central instead of front, and [æ] as open
instead of near-open, to be in line with popular usage? Or maybe it
would satisfy me to see where these two symbols would be mapped on a
different shape to represent vowel space.

Any details on this problem?

Sonja Elen Kisa

Nathan Sanders · Guest

In article
<7d4a6f97-aaa6-42fb-80d3-88d5a2d3cca3@a1g2000hsb.googlegroups.com>,
Sonja Elen Kisa <sonjaaa@gmail.com> wrote:

[quote]Among the other shapes used or proposed, which one is the most helpful
in really showing the vowel space as it really is, either acoustically
or as it is perceived by our ears? Where can I see these? For example,
maybe using tongue height or formants?
[/quote]
Formants. F1 for the vertical axis and F2 (or even better, F2-prime,
which is a complex perceptual combination of F2, F3, and F4) for the
horizontal axis.

Articulation isn>t nearly as useful, because very different
articulations can lead to similar acoustic effects that, for the
purposes of the language, are treated the same.

For example, the American English [r] sound has two different
articulations, varying by speaker (as far as I know, it>s not even
regionally bounded). Some speakers use a bunched and somewhat
retracted tongue, some use a curled tongue. Both sound the same to
native English speakers, and since we can>t see what someone else>s
tongue is doing, we never even notice which [r] they>re using. This
is why, when describing English, you would just use a cover symbol
like plain [r], rather than a more articulatorily precise symbol,
since no single symbol is actually correct for the language as a whole.

[quote]An area that has always bothered me is that most people use [a] to
refer to an open central unrounded vowel (instead of open front
unrounded) and then end up using [æ] to represent the open front
unrounded vowel (which should technically be [a]).
[/quote]
Almost no linguist uses the IPA cardinal vowels exclusively to
represent true cardinal vowels. For example, [i] is nearly always
used to symbolize the frontest, highest, most spread vowel that exists
in the language, but this doesn>t mean that that vowel is actually
pronounced as cardinal [i] (the frontest, highest, most spread vowel
you can physically make), because languages don>t make use of
articulatory extremes if more moderate articulations result in
sufficiently distinctive sounds.

As for the low vowels specifically, very few languages have more than
one or two, so following the IPA>s recommendation of using
typographically simpler symbols when possible, [a] shows up more often
than if the cardinal vowel system were strictly adhered to.

For the purposes of phonology, the IPA is over-precise, so
phonologists make various simplifications and reinterpretations.

For the purposes of phonetics. the IPA is under-precise, so
phoneticians use formants and other quantitative methods.

The IPA is a reasonable, but necessarily imperfect, compromise between
these two needs.

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/

Peter T. Daniels · Guest

On Jul 27, 4:54 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:

[quote]Almost no linguist uses the IPA cardinal vowels exclusively to
represent true cardinal vowels.
[/quote]
As is obvious from the CD accompanying Ladefoged>s *Vowels and
Consonants*, which includes a number of distinguished phoneticians'
demonstrations of the cardinal vowels, including Daniel Jones and
Peter Ladefoged, no two phoneticians, even those trained directly by
Daniel Jones (let alone those trained by his pupils), make the same
noises as either each other or him.

ranjit_mathews@yahoo.com · Guest

On Jul 27, 10:33 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:
[quote]If I were Supreme Commander of the IPA, I would adopt Kirschenbaum>s
usage of [a] as central, and move [æ] down to the low-front corner.
This is pretty much standard practice anyway, even for linguists who
otherwise adhere pretty strictly to the IPA.
[/quote]
How would you distinguish between pat [p&t], putt [pVt] and pot [pat]
(American pronunciation) with just these two symbols?

ranjit_mathews@yahoo.com · Guest

On Jul 28, 12:29 am, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:
[quote]In article
3cce5d4d-530d-4c1c-aabb-6c340fac3...@w7g2000hsa.googlegroups.com>,

"ranjit_math...@yahoo.com" <ranjit_math...@yahoo.com> wrote:
On Jul 27, 10:33 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:
If I were Supreme Commander of the IPA, I would adopt Kirschenbaum>s
usage of [a] as central, and move [æ] down to the low-front corner.
This is pretty much standard practice anyway, even for linguists who
otherwise adhere pretty strictly to the IPA.

How would you distinguish between pat [p&t], putt [pVt] and pot [pat]
(American pronunciation) with just these two symbols?

I would retain <script-a> for a low back vowel, so I>d use [pæt] and
[p<script-a>t] for the "pat" and "pot". (I>m assuming we>re not
talking about Northern Cities Shifted dialects.)
[/quote]
Not just shifted; also non-rhotic in various contexts. RFK didn>t
pronounce dot and dart the same way; yet, you>d have a <script-a> in
transcriptions of both.

[quote]For "putt", I>d use either [p<turned-v>t] (the usual practice, which
doesn>t match the IPA) or [p<schwa>t] (a more IPA-accurate
transcription, but it makes some people uneasy because they want to
keep it separate from the first vowel in "about").
[/quote]
The same vowel at the beginning and end of America makes me uneasy;
the former seems a little more closed than central and the latter a
little more open. But then, this might be because the two qualities
are orthographically (and possibly phonemically) distinct in
Malayalam.

[quote]The vowel in "putt" is in complementary distribution with the first
vowel in "about"; the former is always stressed, the latter is never
stressed. They are also articulatorily and acoustically similar. So,
they are good candidates for being represented by the same symbol,
especially in phonemic transcriptions.
[/quote]
The problem with /@/ also meaning an open central vowel realization is
that it cam convey odd/incorrect impressions such as that "police" has
an open central vowel which it doesn>t.

[quote]If someone really objects to using [<schwa>] phonetically because they
don>t think "putt"'s vowel is truly mid, there are two other unrounded
mid central vowels to choose from, depending on whether they believe
this vowel to be higher than mid (reversed schwa) or lower than mid
(reversed epsilon).

I think the quality varies enough that it isn>t at any consistent
height across speakers, and perhaps not even within a given speaker,
though if I had to choose one, I think it would be more lower-mid than
upper-mid.

Of course, my usual directive is that if the fine-grained phonetic
differences are really that important, you should be giving the
numerical values of the formants and plotting the vowels on a graph,
because the phonetic symbols are a gross approximation of what>s
really going on and should not be relied on for complete phonetic
accuracy. [i] and [u] are nominally the same height, but in reality,
they are usually off a bit from each other.
[/quote]
[e:] and [o:] as in Beethoven are nominally the same in height and are
actually fairly close in height (for those who pronounce them as pure
vowels, that is). [i:] is off from [u:] partly because [i:] is higher
than [e:] to a greater extent than [u:] is higher than [o:].

[quote]This height difference
isn>t usually marked in transcriptions, but would be noticeable in a
formant graph.

Turned-a is really just superfluous, especially after you>ve put a
symbol in the fully open central position.

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams Collegehttp://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/[/quote]

Nathan Sanders · Guest

In article
<79d8e47f-c17a-4dae-a5a6-0d4a6d900de1@l42g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>,
"ranjit_mathews@yahoo.com" <ranjit_mathews@yahoo.com> wrote:

[quote]On Jul 28, 12:29 am, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:
In article
3cce5d4d-530d-4c1c-aabb-6c340fac3...@w7g2000hsa.googlegroups.com>,

"ranjit_math...@yahoo.com" <ranjit_math...@yahoo.com> wrote:
On Jul 27, 10:33 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:
If I were Supreme Commander of the IPA, I would adopt Kirschenbaum>s
usage of [a] as central, and move [æ] down to the low-front corner.
This is pretty much standard practice anyway, even for linguists who
otherwise adhere pretty strictly to the IPA.

How would you distinguish between pat [p&t], putt [pVt] and pot [pat]
(American pronunciation) with just these two symbols?

I would retain <script-a> for a low back vowel, so I>d use [pæt] and
[p<script-a>t] for the "pat" and "pot". (I>m assuming we>re not
talking about Northern Cities Shifted dialects.)

Not just shifted; also non-rhotic in various contexts. RFK didn>t
pronounce dot and dart the same way; yet, you>d have a <script-a> in
transcriptions of both.
[/quote]
Bostonian "dart" is [dat], not [d<script-a>t].

[quote]For "putt", I>d use either [p<turned-v>t] (the usual practice, which
doesn>t match the IPA) or [p<schwa>t] (a more IPA-accurate
transcription, but it makes some people uneasy because they want to
keep it separate from the first vowel in "about").

The same vowel at the beginning and end of America makes me uneasy;
the former seems a little more closed than central and the latter a
little more open. But then, this might be because the two qualities
are orthographically (and possibly phonemically) distinct in
Malayalam.
[/quote]
Raising of schwa is a well-studied phenomena (generally speaking,
word-final schwa raises). In a narrow transcription, this raising
could be transcribed if desired (usually with [<barred-i>]). In a
broad transcription that ignores schwa-raising, [<schwa>] can be used
for both vowels.

[quote]The vowel in "putt" is in complementary distribution with the first
vowel in "about"; the former is always stressed, the latter is never
stressed. They are also articulatorily and acoustically similar. So,
they are good candidates for being represented by the same symbol,
especially in phonemic transcriptions.

The problem with /@/ also meaning an open central vowel realization is
that it cam convey odd/incorrect impressions such as that "police" has
an open central vowel which it doesn>t.
[/quote]
"Putt" doesn>t have an open vowel, at least not for me (my vowels are
pretty close to what is considered general American). My
pronunciation of "putt" has an F1 of about 650 Hz; for "pot", my F1 is
about 760 Hz. In comparison, my F1 for "pet" is about 610 Hz, so my
"putt" is much closer in height to "pet" than it is to "pot".

(And on the issue of unstressed/stressed schwa, my F1 for the final
vowel of "America" is about 630 Hz, basically the same as for "putt".)

As for "police", it would be dealt with in the same way other cases of
schwa-raising are dealt with: narrowly transcribed with a higher
vowel, or ignored if schwa-raising is relevant.

What you ultimately decide to do depends on the purpose of the
transcription. There is no single universal correct transcription,
nor is there such a thing as perfectly narrow transcription. If you
really want something more narrow than what the IPA or other
glyph-based transcription system can do, you give the information
quantitatively, with formant values, spectrograms, etc.

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/

Nathan Sanders · Guest

In article
<3cce5d4d-530d-4c1c-aabb-6c340fac34d9@w7g2000hsa.googlegroups.com>,
"ranjit_mathews@yahoo.com" <ranjit_mathews@yahoo.com> wrote:

[quote]On Jul 27, 10:33 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:
If I were Supreme Commander of the IPA, I would adopt Kirschenbaum>s
usage of [a] as central, and move [æ] down to the low-front corner.
This is pretty much standard practice anyway, even for linguists who
otherwise adhere pretty strictly to the IPA.

How would you distinguish between pat [p&t], putt [pVt] and pot [pat]
(American pronunciation) with just these two symbols?
[/quote]
I would retain <script-a> for a low back vowel, so I>d use [pæt] and
[p<script-a>t] for the "pat" and "pot". (I>m assuming we>re not
talking about Northern Cities Shifted dialects.)

For "putt", I>d use either [p<turned-v>t] (the usual practice, which
doesn>t match the IPA) or [p<schwa>t] (a more IPA-accurate
transcription, but it makes some people uneasy because they want to
keep it separate from the first vowel in "about").

The vowel in "putt" is in complementary distribution with the first
vowel in "about"; the former is always stressed, the latter is never
stressed. They are also articulatorily and acoustically similar. So,
they are good candidates for being represented by the same symbol,
especially in phonemic transcriptions.

If someone really objects to using [<schwa>] phonetically because they
don>t think "putt"'s vowel is truly mid, there are two other unrounded
mid central vowels to choose from, depending on whether they believe
this vowel to be higher than mid (reversed schwa) or lower than mid
(reversed epsilon).

I think the quality varies enough that it isn>t at any consistent
height across speakers, and perhaps not even within a given speaker,
though if I had to choose one, I think it would be more lower-mid than
upper-mid.

Of course, my usual directive is that if the fine-grained phonetic
differences are really that important, you should be giving the
numerical values of the formants and plotting the vowels on a graph,
because the phonetic symbols are a gross approximation of what>s
really going on and should not be relied on for complete phonetic
accuracy. [i] and [u] are nominally the same height, but in reality,
they are usually off a bit from each other. This height difference
isn>t usually marked in transcriptions, but would be noticeable in a
formant graph.

Turned-a is really just superfluous, especially after you>ve put a
symbol in the fully open central position.

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/

Brian M. Scott · Guest

On Sun, 27 Jul 2008 23:33:01 -0400, Nathan Sanders
<nsanders@williams.edu> wrote in
<news:nsanders-27883E.23330027072008@news.newsguy.com> in
sci.lang:

[...]

[quote]No language seems to make distinctive phonological use of
the half-open height (it never operates as a separate
class from both low and mid at the same time),
[/quote]
There is one instance of that contrast that I>ve heard from
a few Americans: <lagger>, <lager>, and <logger>. (I
*think* that I had it as a kid; now I have [æ], [a], and
[A.].)

[...]

Brian

Nathan Sanders · Guest

In article <i3ajk.23251$IK1.21941@news-server.bigpond.net.au>,
"John Atkinson" <johnacko@bigpond.com> wrote:

[quote]Agree with all this, but as far as [a] and [&]/[æ] is concerned, Sonja
has a excellent point. From time to time, it>s been pointed out here
that IPA and Kirshenbaum are inconsistent: IPA has [a] as open front
and [æ] as near-open front, and no simple symbol for open central;
Kirschenbaum has [&] as open front and [a] as open central, and no
simple symbol for near-open front.
[/quote]
If I were Supreme Commander of the IPA, I would adopt Kirschenbaum>s
usage of [a] as central, and move [æ] down to the low-front corner.
This is pretty much standard practice anyway, even for linguists who
otherwise adhere pretty strictly to the IPA.

I>m not convinced that half-open is even a necessary vowel height
description anyway, so I>d just eliminate that position altogether,
which means also getting rid of [upside-down-a], or perhaps, on
analogy with upside-down-script-a, using it for a low round central
vowel, (in case one is ever found), since no such symbol exists yet.

No language seems to make distinctive phonological use of the
half-open height (it never operates as a separate class from both low
and mid at the same time), and if someone really felt the need to
indicate it being phonetically distinctive from both low and mid, they
could just use the raising diacritic on the corresponding low symbol,
the lowering diacritic on the corresponding mid vowel, or better yet,
plot everything on a formant chart, which is even more accurate and
informative.

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/

Brian M. Scott · Guest

On Mon, 28 Jul 2008 02:22:06 GMT, John Atkinson
<johnacko@bigpond.com> wrote in
<news:i3ajk.23251$IK1.21941@news-server.bigpond.net.au> in
sci.lang:

[...]

[quote]Agree with all this, but as far as [a] and [&]/[æ] is
concerned, Sonja has a excellent point. From time to
time, it>s been pointed out here that IPA and
Kirshenbaum are inconsistent: IPA has [a] as open front
and [æ] as near-open front, and no simple symbol for open
central; Kirschenbaum has [&] as open front and [a] as
open central, and no simple symbol for near-open front.
[/quote]
It does? Good grief. I never even checked, assuming that
they had the usual IPA values.

[...]

Brian

John Atkinson · Guest

Nathan Sanders wrote:
[quote]Sonja Elen Kisa <sonjaaa@gmail.com> wrote:

Among the other shapes used or proposed, which one is the most
helpful in really showing the vowel space as it really is, either
acoustically or as it is perceived by our ears? Where can I see
these? For example, maybe using tongue height or formants?

Formants. F1 for the vertical axis and F2 (or even better, F2-prime,
which is a complex perceptual combination of F2, F3, and F4) for the
horizontal axis.

Articulation isn>t nearly as useful, because very different
articulations can lead to similar acoustic effects that, for the
purposes of the language, are treated the same.

For example, the American English [r] sound has two different
articulations, varying by speaker (as far as I know, it>s not even
regionally bounded). Some speakers use a bunched and somewhat
retracted tongue, some use a curled tongue. Both sound the same to
native English speakers, and since we can>t see what someone else>s
tongue is doing, we never even notice which [r] they>re using. This
is why, when describing English, you would just use a cover symbol
like plain [r], rather than a more articulatorily precise symbol,
since no single symbol is actually correct for the language as a
whole.

An area that has always bothered me is that most people use [a] to
refer to an open central unrounded vowel (instead of open front
unrounded) and then end up using [æ] to represent the open front
unrounded vowel (which should technically be [a]).

Almost no linguist uses the IPA cardinal vowels exclusively to
represent true cardinal vowels. For example, [i] is nearly always
used to symbolize the frontest, highest, most spread vowel that exists
in the language, but this doesn>t mean that that vowel is actually
pronounced as cardinal [i] (the frontest, highest, most spread vowel
you can physically make), because languages don>t make use of
articulatory extremes if more moderate articulations result in
sufficiently distinctive sounds.

As for the low vowels specifically, very few languages have more than
one or two, so following the IPA>s recommendation of using
typographically simpler symbols when possible, [a] shows up more often
than if the cardinal vowel system were strictly adhered to.

For the purposes of phonology, the IPA is over-precise, so
phonologists make various simplifications and reinterpretations.

For the purposes of phonetics. the IPA is under-precise, so
phoneticians use formants and other quantitative methods.

The IPA is a reasonable, but necessarily imperfect, compromise between
these two needs.
[/quote]
Agree with all this, but as far as [a] and [&]/[æ] is concerned, Sonja
has a excellent point. From time to time, it>s been pointed out here
that IPA and Kirshenbaum are inconsistent: IPA has [a] as open front
and [æ] as near-open front, and no simple symbol for open central;
Kirschenbaum has [&] as open front and [a] as open central, and no
simple symbol for near-open front. As I>m sure you>ve noticed, this
tends to lead to interminable arguments whenever the English vowels
articulated in this region are discussed here (which is far too often,
IMO), simply because some people are using one system and some the
other.

It seems to me that the IPA system is the less satisfactory of the two
here. After all, the majority of the world>s languages have a single
open vowel phoneme, which is typically central (though usually with both
front and back allophones). Almost universally, it>s written as /a /.
Yes, I know that IPA wasn>t invented to provide symbols for
phonologists, but they do find it convenient to make use of them, and
it>d be nice if the characteristic position of the most common vowel
phoneme in the world was actually occupied by a basic symbol on the IPA
chart.

Admittedly, like you say, there aren>t many languages with three
distinct fully open vowel phonemes (front, central, back), a la
Kirshenbaum -- English (some varieties) is rather exceptional
(TRAP/PALM/LOT). For that matter, there aren>t a lot of languages with
five unrounded front vowel phonemes, a la IPA.

The optimum solution would to have simple symbols for all three
positions -- for the IPA to move [a] backwards to central, retain [æ]
where it is, and introduce a new symbol ([&]?) (or something) for fully
open front, where their [a] is now. I>m not holding my breath in
anticipation though.

John.

ranjit_mathews@yahoo.com · Guest

On Jul 28, 2:14 am, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:
[quote]Not just shifted; also non-rhotic in various contexts. RFK didn>t
pronounce dot and dart the same way; yet, you>d have a <script-a> in
transcriptions of both.

Bostonian "dart" is [dat], not [d<script-a>t].
[/quote]
From what you said here ...
<< [p<script-a>t] for the "pat" and "pot". >>
.... I thought IPA [dat] would become [d<script-a>t] in Sanders' PA.

ranjit_mathews@yahoo.com · Guest

On Jul 28, 2:14 am, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:
[quote]The same vowel at the beginning and end of America makes me uneasy;
the former seems a little more closed than central and the latter a
little more open. But then, this might be because the two qualities
are orthographically (and possibly phonemically) distinct in
Malayalam.

Raising of schwa is a well-studied phenomena (generally speaking,
word-final schwa raises). In a narrow transcription, this raising
could be transcribed if desired (usually with [<barred-i>]). In a
broad transcription that ignores schwa-raising, [<schwa>] can be used
for both vowels.
[/quote]
I have 4 central vowels in my Malayalam; 3 of them phonemically
distinct:
1) barred i like in an American>s "Memphis".
2) [e"] like the last vowel in an American>s "buses".
3) [@] like in French "le"
4) [V] like the first vowek in an American>s "buses".

#3 is used only terminally and is (phonemically and?) orthographically
(in the Malayalam script) indistinct from #4. A noun ending in [V]
changes its ending to [@] when used as an adjective.

ranjit_mathews@yahoo.com · Guest

On Jul 28, 2:14 am, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:
[quote]"Putt" doesn>t have an open vowel, at least not for me (my vowels are
pretty close to what is considered general American). My
pronunciation of "putt" has an F1 of about 650 Hz; for "pot", my F1 is
about 760 Hz.
[/quote]
On the formant charts of many Continental European languages, 650Hz is
open enough to be pegged as the (Kirshenbaum/ Carresquer) [a"] rather
than as [@]

ranjit_mathews@yahoo.com · Guest

On Jul 28, 9:46 am, "John Atkinson" <johna...@bigpond.com> wrote:
[quote]ranjit_math...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Jul 28, 2:14 am, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:
ranjit:
The same vowel at the beginning and end of America makes me uneasy;
the former seems a little more closed than central and the latter a
little more open. But then, this might be because the two qualities
are orthographically (and possibly phonemically) distinct in
Malayalam.

Raising of schwa is a well-studied phenomena (generally speaking,
word-final schwa raises). In a narrow transcription, this raising
could be transcribed if desired (usually with [<barred-i>]). In a
broad transcription that ignores schwa-raising, [<schwa>] can be used
for both vowels.

I have 4 central vowels in my Malayalam; 3 of them phonemically
distinct:
1) barred i like in an American>s "Memphis".
2) [e"] like the last vowel in an American>s "buses".
3) [@] like in French "le"
4) [V] like the first vowek in an American>s "buses".

#3 is used only terminally and is (phonemically and?) orthographically
(in the Malayalam script) indistinct from #4. A noun ending in [V]
changes its ending to [@] when used as an adjective.

Interesting. In the Malayalam analysed by Asher and Kumari (1997), as
quoted by Krishnamurti in the Cambridge green book, the vowel phonemes
are /i i: e e: a a: o o: u u: /, and, marginally, /æ /. All are either
front or back except /a a: /, which AFAICT are central, and none seem to
correspond with any in your list except (perhaps) /a/, which might be
your "3) and 4)".
[/quote]
#1 The so-called vocalic R is syllabic only inbetween a labial and a
velar (eg. krmi meaning worm). In other contexts, it is [r.i"]. Also,
in my dialect, /u/ becomes [i"] in some contexts; eg., /muRRam/ is
pronounced [mi"t_:@m] (an orthographic double trill is pronounced as a
long alveolar stop). Word terminal /u/ frequently becomes [i"] but
some some words irregularly (i.e., not based on phonetic context) have
a strong terminal /u/ that gets realized as [U]. So, I>d analyze my
dialect as having /i"/.

[quote]The script, of course, distinguishes the vowels <i i: e e: a a: o o: u
u: ai au>.
[/quote]
#2 too is distinguished by the script. Orthographically, it is written
as a virAmam, a half-moon above the consonant. In a terminal context,
it is pronounced as [e"], eg., /palle"/ meaning tooth.

#1 is distinguished to the extent that vocalic R (typically realized
as [r.i"]) is written differently from /*i/ and /r.i/.

[quote]How accurately do these correspond to the phonemes, either
yours or the ones quoted by Krishnamurti? In particular, what
orthographic vowels are used for your phonemes "1)" and "2)"?
[/quote]
Note re. the orthographic vowel for #2: In a medial context, a virAmam
(half-moon above consonant) makes a consonant "vowel-less" (not
followed by a vowel). In a terminal context, it adds an [e"] after the
consonant. Those consonants that can occur in vowel-less form
terminally have an alternate grapheme (called [tZil:e"] in Malayalam)
for the vowel-less form of the consonant. These graphemes are not used
medially since in a medial context, a virAmam can be used to make the
consonant vowel-less.


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