Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>]

Yes. Exactly. No alphabet I know of takes care of prosody carefully.
Excellent observation with strong implications for our discussion on
perception. Evidently we are all able to perceive prosody in speech signals
but rarely feel the need to do represent them in written systems. We see
accents in some languages on words. We see people italicising certain words
in writing. We also see people using capitals WHEN THEY ARE SHOUTING ;-) but
no unambiguous system yet to be found. This has psycholinguistic
implications also. Why didn't the implementors of the alphabet feel the need
to indicate prosodic information?

James Christian

2010/1/22 Joel C. Salomon <joelcsalomon AT gmail.com>

> On 1/22/2010 10:17 AM, James Christian wrote:
> > Could you send me a .wav file of a b_ syllable? I'm pretty sure that
> > we'll find a schwa at the end of it.
>
> Heh.  The underscore was intended as _emphasis_.
>
> —Joel C. Salomon
>