Is the glottal stop phonemic in English?

Oh, how tricky trying to choose what symbols to transcribe vowels with is! For example, at least here, what are traditionally marked as [{] and [E] in informal speech often take actual positions such that there is only a slight height contrast between them and where the most important actual contrast is actually a front-back contrast, such that one could *almost* map formal /{/ and /E/ to [E] and [3] for my very informal speech. In reality, the actual phones are slightly lower than cardinal [E] and somewhere between cardinal [E] and cardinal [3], respectively, in most informal speech.

Now what symbols should I use to mark said phones? Most of the time I tend to just use the more traditional [{] and [E], respectively, except in certain words which are unambiguously [E], such as very informal "yeah" and "can" (unreduced), which at times almost seem as they are actually /E/ and not /{/ phonemically due to the degree of shifting. Yet from a more theoretical rather than traditional approach it almost seems as if I might be better off using [E] and [3] instead of [{] and [E].

Hehe, yes, choosing what symbols to use when transcribing can be tricky, especially with vowels. Like you, Travis, I tend to generally use the more traditional GAE-like transcriptions for vowels even tho in my typical speech they are shifted around some by the California Vowel Shift. Last night when I was ordering a pepperoni pizza I realized right after I said it that I had full-on [{] for the first vowel in "pepperoni" instead of [E] (so, using spelling I said "papperoni"). I was even surprised at how low it was, since for me it's not normally [{] but more like a lowered [E]. But that goes to show the possible range for vowels that are going thru a comprehensive chain shift.

<<I should have said that the IPA (International Phonetic Script) for the velar u sound is a letter that looks something like a square 'w' or the wide prongs of a pitchfork. Some phoneticists also write it as a 'u' with a curl above it.>>

I'm not sure what you mean. I know of no such IPA symbol. The IPA vowel symbols are listed here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel

Which one do you mean? And what's an example of a word it's used in (for any language)?

I don't know about Korean or any Turkic languages here, but the vowel you are speaking about in Japanese is not a far-back vowel of any sort but rather [M], that is, an unrounded high back vowel. But anyways, if one were to notationally mark any kind of rounded high far-back vowel in X-SAMPA, I would probably mark such as [u_-] or [u_e] (the latter corresponds to what you are talking about).

<<Wikipedia, in your example, calls it a "back u" but nevertheless it appears frequently in IPA transcriptions of words in the Altaic languages, especially Korean, Japanese and Turkic (Turkish, Azeri, Uzbek, Tuvan, Uigyr, Yakut etc.).>>

Do you mean /ɯ/ (which is /M/ in X-SAMPA)? It's a high-back unrounded vowel.

That's the symbol I use to transcribe my vowel in words like "food" or "hoot," tho mine's actually fronter than that.

<<Last night when I was ordering a pepperoni pizza I realized right after I said it that I had full-on [{] for the first vowel in "pepperoni" instead of [E] (so, using spelling I said "papperoni"). I was even surprised at how low it was, since for me it's not normally [{] but more like a lowered [E]. But that goes to show the possible range for vowels that are going thru a comprehensive chain shift.>>

And compare that with Australia, where the complete opposite process has occurred and [E] has turned into [e]. And they say that English dialects are converging! ;-)

<<I should have said that the IPA (International Phonetic Script)>>

Not to seem pedantic, but it's the International Phonetic *Alphabet*, not the International Phonetic Script, which you have repeatedly called it. One time you referred to the "International Phonetic Script" and I honestly didn't realize that we were talking about the same thing.

>>And compare that with Australia, where the complete opposite process has occurred and [E] has turned into [e]. <<

As allophones in AusE, they are interchangeable. The relaxed [E] is more prevalent in my speech though.

<<Technically you are right but quibbling over someone else's diction is petty and almost always a waste of time... "Alphabet, alphabetic script, script, orthography, writing system" all mean basically the same thing.>>

Well, the official name *is* International Phonetic Alphabet...

Also, no one's quibbling, just pointing out the name.