Some inaccuracies in my post

[wburns -at- MICRON -dot- COM]

I realized last night as I was reviewing some old linguistic texts that
a few comments I made concerning the E-mail/e-mail/email were inaccurate,
so I'd like to eliminate any potential misundertandings.

My posting was in response to Mike Huber's retraction following Richard M's
examples of words beginning with "em" in English.  I referred to the
morphological features concerning those terms.  I should have been speaking of
the phonological features.  (Morphemes are the smallest meaningful linguistic
units, while phonemes are the smallest phonetic elements that can convey a
distinction in meaning.)  I also referred to the initial sound in "emu"
as a low front vowel.  I had my mental vowel diagram flipped upside down.
(I HATE when I do that! :-| )  This sound is actually a HIGH front vowel sound
(the difference being the proximity of the tongue in relation to the upper
palate).

One other point--I also remembered another distinctly English word that DOES
have an initially stressed high front vowel--evil.  The possible phonemic
difference (and it is a pretty important distinction) is that people often
pronounce the second syllable without a vowel or with a schwa (which can't be
stressed without changing its quality).

One can also offer a counterargument that the "e" in E-mail(e-mail/email) is
a bound morpheme (like un- or -ed) and should be treated consistently
in that respect (i.e., without a hyphen or initial cap).

Having done more than enough off-topic chatter, I'll now take my portion
off list.

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             +                   Bill Burns                    +
             +  Assembly Training and Documentation Supervisor +
             +                WBURNS -at- MICRON -dot- COM                +
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                             Stop plate tectonics!
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