In studies on English phonology it has often been pointed out that sp, st, sk present difficulties of interpretation. In by far the majority of these studies a bisegmental interpretation has been adopted, and the discussion has then turned on the identity of the second elements of these consonant clusters. Should the stop constituents be analysed as /p, t, k/, /b, d, g/, or /P, T, K/ (i.e. archiphonemes)? In the American structuralist school a /p, t, k/ analysis has usually been preferred on the basis of ‘ phonetic realism’ (e.g. Swadesh 1934, Pike 1947, Trager and Smith 1951), but it has subsequently been demonstrated that the stops after s are phonetically more similar to /b, d, g/ than to /p, t, k/ (Lotz et al. 1960, Reeds and Wang 1961, Davidsen-Nielsen 1969). In Praguean phonology, e.g. Trubetzkoy 1939, an archiphonemic solution has been advocated.

One peculiarity of St. Lawrence Island (SLI henceforth) Eskimo is the vowel lengthening which is triggered by the [ə] (or [ɨ]).Such vowel lengthening only takes place in the first syllable and under certain phonological conditions. The vowel thus lengthened assumes the full length of a long vowel, distinct from a short vowel and a ‘fake’ long vowel.

In response to the editorial note published recently in JIPA (Wells 1974), we wish to indicate one of the several problems involved in establishing the terminology of diachronic (and morphophonemic) processes. There are evidently three different variables that could be used for classifying (and hence naming) the conditioned sound changes: (1) the environment that induces the change, (2) the sound that undergoes the change, and (3) the sound that results from the change.

In ‘Another note on RP notation’ (1974) Gordon Walsh of the Longman Materials Development Unit made some comments on the 1972 JIPA article of mine, on the notation of the British English segmental phonemes, which had offered an explanation of the symbol choices embodied in my Concise Pronouncing Dictionary and also used by me in the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English (1974).

It has been observed (Halliday 1967: 33–34, 54–55 ; cf. Crystal 1969: 273, ix, and Lee 1960: 58–59, with different tonality treatment) that the fall-rise nuclear tone in such sentences as

I ˈdidn't ˈcome because of the ˅food.

The following specimen is a version of ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ in the Breton dialect of Groix, an island situated off the south coast of Brittany. Groix Breton belongs to the Vannetais dialect group. It has been described in the author's Grammaire structurale du Breton de l'Île de Groix (Ternes 1970).

Some current applications of the Association's alphabet, for example in EFL practice materials or in dictionaries, make it desirable to establish an ‘alphabetical order’ for the symbols. Various ad hoc orders have been used in the past, especially when giving lists of symbols in practice books, but no generally-agreed ordering has yet emerged (which, in the case of English at least, is perhaps surprising).

It is surely incontestable that the IPA alphabet, like the system of vowel and consonant classification on which it is based, contains obvious anomalies; some or others of which have been discussed in recent proposals for reform (e.g. Breckwoldt 1971, McClure 1972, Hammarström 1973). Fox (1975), in an interesting attempt to widen the scope of the discussion, has argued that the anomalies are less serious than they appear, on the grounds that (a) they do not interfere with the practical usefulness of the alphabet, and (b) a more positive and more fundamental point—they reflect in some cases what appear to be linguistic universals, such as the potential use of retroflex consonants as a distinctive category and the widespread preference for voiced over voiceless nasals.

Linking /r/ concerns words having as final phoneme in isolate pronunciation either /ɑ/ or /ɔ/ or one of the five phonemes involving a (final) central vowel /ə, ɜ, ɪə, eə, ʊə/. When any of these is followed closely by a word beginning with one of the English vowel sounds an /r/ may be heard. The Gimson 1970 treatment of this topic contains detailed comments on the limitation of the operation of this pattern in situations where many or most speakers are inhibited from applying the rule to link owing to the influence of popular conceptions of incorrectitude in regard to the uttering of /r/ where no r is represented in the traditional orthography. However, it contains no explicit reference to the dependence of the r-link on either the segmental or the prosodic environments which the words involved in the r-link provide. On the other hand, Ward 1939 and various works of Jones (1918, 1956a, 1956b, 1956c) described at some length ‘special circumstances in which a final r has no consonantal value even when the following word begins with a vowel’ (Jones 1956b : § 757). Gimson 1970 makes no reference to such cases nor to Jones's mention of them. The enquirer must therefore wonder whether there is no reference to such exceptional cases because they are no longer current or merely from pressures of space or possibly from uncertainty. Gimson's revision of the Jones 1956a text of Jones's Explanations in Jones-Gimson 1967, which makes several minor amendments, leaves the fairly lengthy treatment of linking /r/ unaltered.

The analysis of affricates is controversial in many languages. Phonemecizations are often adopted on the basis of criteria specifically related to the individual languages being analysed. After reviewing a few proposed solutions, I will present the one I consider most appropriate for Haitian Creole.

Spanish intonation has been described by several authors and linguists with a variety of subjective terms. Those adjectives which recur most frequently are GRAVE and AGUDO. Grave, which seems to mean ‘low pitch’, is assigned mainly to the dialects of northern Spain and especially to Castilian; agudo, on the other hand, seems to mean ‘high pitch’ and is frequently used to describe the dialects of Spanish America. In this article some objective data will be presented on voice register and intonation in two dialects of Spanish, those of Madrid and Mexico City, as a first step in clarifying the use of these two subjective terms. The results of research presented here are based on tape-recorded interviews with native Spanish speakers and an electronic analysis of those recordings by the Léon-Martin pitch extractor at the University of Toronto.