Wiktionary talk:General American English with maximal distinctions

This is good. But I think "ḓ" is superfluous. Like deaspiration of stops after "s", the flapping of d is conditioned by environment. ("ṱ" in this case though is usable, as a representation of "t" that for some people that has _become_ d. But if you're using IPA, it'd rather be "t̬", no?) Also something that might be helpful is explicitly mapping these to "dictionary" notation. —Muke Tever 16:55, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)


 * The thing is flapped 'd' and unflapped 'd' are articulated differenly. It's not that /t/ becomes [d] in flapping environments. What happens is both /t/ and /d/ become [ɾ] in flapping environments. British speakers who may be trying to learn how to speak with an American accent will need it marked in the pronunciation when 'd' is flapped and when it isn't.


 * It isn't that /t/ becames the phone [d] in flapping environments, but that in such cases /t/ has already moved to the phoneme /d/ and that /d/ is [ɾ]. This is how dictionaries such as the OED annotate the flap in words like 'writer': as /d/.  The flapping is not specifically marked, as it is predictable from the environment.  —Muke Tever 17:54, 1 August 2005 (UTC)


 * While admittedly appealing, this analysis cannot be correct. The two phonemes have not merged in the flapping environment, but in fact remain distinct, and there is strong evidence for this: when asked to pronounce slowly or carefully, AmE speakers will in fact pronounce e.g. ladder and latter differently. Webster 3 experimented with transcribing flapped /t/ as [d], but none of the subsequent Merriam-Websters maintained the conceit because it so strongly violates people's intuitions about the underlying representations of these words. The argument that /t/ has actually become /d/ in the flapping environment is difficult to accept in the light of this evidence, and waving it all away under the guise of the "corrupting" influence of spelling doesn't really obtain. Nohat 17:03, 2 August 2005 (UTC)


 * The reason I picked ṱ instead of t̬ is because the down-pointing circumflex represents voicing, which is not the salient articulatory characteristic; it's flapping. There isn't an official IPA diacritic to represent flapping, so I picked one that is similar to the diacritic for voicing but that isn't used by the IPA for anything else. Also, since the intention is to mark both /t/ and /d/ for flapping, it doesn't make any sense to mark a "voiced" /d/ since it's already voiced (actually in many cases it's not, but that's neither here nor there). Nohat 05:27, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

Proposal status
This looks quite intruiging. Has anything ever come of this proposal? --Connel MacKenzie 18:05, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Nothing at the moment; however I am considering undertaking a project of using the Carnegie Mellon pronunciation dictionary to add pronunciations to a large number of entries. It's all in my head at the moment, but I'll update here and perhaps elsewhere when I have a firmer plan. Nohat 05:27, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

General American English with maximal distinctions
Same as above. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:24, 22 October 2009 (UTC)
 * delete. This appears to have been a proposal for a non-standard, simplified derivative of the IPA. It isn't used anywhere and (imo) shouldn't be. We should not present something as IPA when it isn't, and we already have one home-brewed pronunciation scheme (enPR) that is designed to be simpler for US users, so I don't see why another one is needed. Thryduulf (talk) 13:22, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Deleted a mere eight months later. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:13, 11 June 2010 (UTC)