Underlying

In phonology class we talked about phonemic versus phonetic transcription: phonetic transcriptions attempt to capture the sounds as they are actually articulated, while phonemic transcriptions aim to represent how we represent words at a mental level, before articulatory rules transform some of the sounds. In order for something to count as a phoneme, it has to be in contrastive distribution with other phonemes. In English, the vowel known as "schwa" -- an unstressed vowel as in the first syllable of "potato" -- is not considered a phoneme because its appearance is completely predictable: it shows up when there is no stress on the vowel, and not otherwise. So it's not a distinct phoneme.

This raises the question of what the "underlying" vowels are in words that have a schwa. One way to try to tell this is by adding stress to the word, like you were saying it pointedly and angrily to someone who refused to understand you. So picture yelling "PO-TA-TO, you moron!" The first vowel turns into an "o", right? Or we can look at derived words: to find the second vowel in "metal", look at "metallic". But these options aren't always available -- what's the second vowel in "button"? It's hard to stress the second syllable without making it sound like a different word, and if we want derived words we have to make them up...can something with the quality of a button be...buttonic? How do we pronounce that? Anything we come up with is necessarily rather contrived.

So I was thinking about my name, which has in fact two schwas, and trying to determine the underlying vowels. And it seemed immediately obvious to me that the vowel in the first syllable is really an /i/ -- that is, a "long E" sound as in "me". This didn't seem as obvious to the few people I mentioned it to as it did to me, which made me wonder why I thought of my name that way.

I realized yesterday that it's because that's how my Grandma Serry says my name: Ree-becca.

So that's what my name is, underlyingly. /ribEka/

I'm still trying, however, to figure out what Adam's name is. If it's like "atom", then judging by "atomic", should it be /a/, like "Bob"? Thoughts? ^_^;