Pronouncing "L'' and "R" like a diphthong?!

<<Pronouncing dictionary meant an online dictionary with sound files for each word.>>

And who do you think is behind those dictionaries (whether online or in book form?). Companies which publish dictionaries employ legions of linguists, and the pronunciation entries in dictionaries are no exception. The linguists working on those sections tend to be specialists in phonetics/phonology and dialectology, amongst other things.

<<I do not think you can compare doctors or medical research to the sophistry of linguistics.>>

Psst...I wasn't drawing a direct comparison. I was only noting that linguists are the experts in their field, human language, much like physicians and medical researchers are in their respective fields, yet unqualified people don't get away with ignorantly writing them off. The stubbornness and antiintellectualism of your comments is astounding.

<<The learning of languages is based on a lot of listening and reading and eventually speaking and writing. A person can learn languages without reference to the work of linguists, but the health of individuals does depend on the progress of medical science.>>

Your analogy doesn't work, as long as you're playing that game. Sure, there may be no direct reference to specific linguists in learning a language, but I can also lead a healthy life and learn a lot of new things about how to take care of myself better without reference to specific doctors in my daily life. Your comparison doesn't work because you're trying to compare reference to linguists and general medical progress. You should compare the domains of linguistic and medical research and their relation to their specific fields.

Also, another point. You seem to imply that linguistics is around to specifically help language learners. While many applications and uses of linguistic knowledge may be used that way, that's not linguistics' primary focus.

<<All the schwas, the phonemes, the graphemes, the dangling participles socio-linguistics etc. ar irrelevant to the language learner.>>

That's funny, because that statement is patently false for many language learners I know. I work parttime at an English language institute with English language learners who can't get enough of that kind of stuff. I'll comment that for me personally learning Spanish, my knowledge of linguistics as related to the Spanish language did truly help me understand and work on improving various aspects of how I spoke and understood the language.

Kirk

I read your post twice and could not find one relevant argument.

1) The online dictionaries provide recordings of the pronunciation of words..no IPA no schwas
2) Medical research and publications are largely aimed a finding new medicines and treatments that help people stay or become healthy. The activity of linguists has little similar effect on language learners.
3) Linguistics' primary focus is not to help learners, as you yourself say. It is an intellectual exercize that amuses certain people, which is fine, but is of little practical use. That is my point.
4) You claim your learners cannot get enough of these linguistics discussions, but I would certainly advise learners to steer clear of them and spend their time on interesting input, listening, reading and learning more vocabulary..and then going out and using the language.

<<I read your post twice and could not find one relevant argument>>

Well, considering your previous record, I don't think 40 tries would have produced satisfying results for you.

<<1) The online dictionaries provide recordings of the pronunciation of words..no IPA no schwas>>

Whether IPA proper is used or not in a dictionary's transcription system is irrelevant here as, linguists are involved regardless. Take Webster, which does not use IPA in its transcriptions but has linguists on staff to describe the sounds for the purposes of their dictionary. Also, some dictionaries do in fact use IPA. Some of the most respected dictionaries, such as Oxford, use only IPA in their transcriptions for their many dictionaries out there.

<<2) Medical research and publications are largely aimed a finding new medicines and treatments that help people stay or become healthy. The activity of linguists has little similar effect on language learners.>>

I don't wish to argue about something which was a side comment of mine before. What I was pointing out was that if you're pretending to be knowledgeable about something dealing with language, you should understand some linguistics, as linguistics' specialty is the domain of language as pertaining to humans (just as medical researchers' domain is pertains to the human body). We can probably eschew the medical bickering.

<<3) Linguistics' primary focus is not to help learners, as you yourself say. It is an intellectual exercize that amuses certain people, which is fine, but is of little practical use. That is my point.>>

It may be an intellectual exercise (as if that were a bad thing?!), but the various subdomains of linguistics do have plenty of practical purposes. Besides academia, certain areas of the private-sector seek linguists---voice recognition software companies need phoneticists. Marketing companies use linguists, especially sociolinguists. Speech pathologists usually have a linguistics degree. I have a friend who just graduated from here (UCSD) with a bachelor's in linguistics and got hired by a software firm looking for people to work on syntax-related projects for their products. Anyway, I don't need to go any further as this has little to do with what we were talking about before...

<<4) You claim your learners cannot get enough of these linguistics discussions, but I would certainly advise learners to steer clear of them and spend their time on interesting input, listening, reading and learning more vocabulary..and then going out and using the language.>>

They're not mutually exclusive. I never suggested anyone just look at IPA transcriptions as a viable method of learning a language. As you said, listening, speaking (preferably with native speakers), reading, and just in general practicing the target language are what will help people. Linguistic data can provide tools to people who want to improve certain aspects of their language learning process but things like IPA are not meant to be a substitute for real person-to-person interaction. You're completely missing the point of what linguistics is about and what I've been saying.

On that note, it's funny we're talking about this now as I have to go to work soon and speak with English learners. Have a great day.

<<I'm not sure what you mean by "Before R, tense vowels tend to 'break' into a centering diphthong, which is a vowel followed by a schwa." Lazar.

It's my understanding that

The vowel in "fear" is [I@] in RP. This is vowel. It's not a tense vowel before an <r> it's a centring diphthong. It is not followed by any schwa. It's not followed by anything. Orthographically the <r> is part of the vowel-trigraph.

Similarly, "air" is pronounced as a vowel in RP. The whole word is a grapheme representing [e@]. It's not [ei] plus [r] it's just [e@]. The same applies to "tour": the <our> is the grapheme representing [u@].>>

Sorry, I meant that RP pronunciations like [fI@] and [E@] arose from a *historical* tense vowel plus R - hundreds of years ago, they would have been [fir] and [er], but at some point they "broke" into [fI@r] and [E@r], and later happened to lose the R and become [fI@] and [E@].

rerro.rike ry raddy ralrays rez.rerroy riz ry rend.

Scooby Scooby Doo, where are you? You've got some work to do now.

>>The progress of medical science refers to the doubling of life expectancy achieved over the last century through what you call "establishment research". I expect to live to over 80. At the turn of the century the number was 40. <<

What about the "Alexander Technique"? There are other examples.

>>The progress of medical science refers to the doubling of life expectancy achieved over the last century through what you call "establishment research". I expect to live to over 80. At the turn of the century the number was 40. <<

There are well credentialed people who would challenge these numbers.

Here's a pet peeve of mine:

I find it very misleading when people talk about some historical period and say, "The average lifespan was 40! So when you were 20 years old, they would think you were middle aged!" No, they wouldn't. Just because 40 (for example) might have been the *mathematical average*, that doesn't mean it was a typical lifespan. A *lot* of people used to die in infancy and childhood, a lot of young men died in wars, a lot of young women died in childbirth, and a lot of people died from assorted illnesses at any age. If you survived that gauntlet, then you might have lived into your seventies or eighties. It wasn't as if most people dropped dead at age 40.