>>You reasoning for favouring /e/ and /o/ over /eI/ and /oU/ analysis-wise the context of your dialect does make sense to me. Your analysis expressedly ignores "even trying to maintain any concordance of underlying forms across dialects" which is fine in that particluar context. What I have in mind, though, is transcriptions for English phonemes in general.
This, may, of course, be an absurdly impossible task but not entirely. It may be laxness verses tenseness which distinguishes "wet" and "wait" for you whereas for me the distinction is short vowel verses diphthong but can we not argue that my [e] and your [E] are the same phoneme and that my [{I] and your [e] are also the same phoneme?<<
Of course, this would likely require some notation for marking phonemes which is not based on what their "default" surface forms in any given dialect are, but rather is based on referring to phonemes logically in a crossdialectal fashion based on direct correlation of different forms in different dialects. Such would act to remove how linked phonemes in different dialects are actually realized at all from the picture, and limit matters to solely the common origin or correlation of the phonemes in question.
>>There will, of course be phonemes that one dialect has and another lacks but is this too great a problem? You don't have my /O/ (RP's /Q/). Can't I just say that you're missing a phoneme? Of course, it's not really that simple but maybe you see where I'm trying to get.<<
Yes, I get what you're saying. In most but not all cases, my /O/ is logically a different phoneme from your /O/, with the primary exceptions being places where RP has /Q/ and my dialect has /O/ rather than /A/.
>>Now, in a general English context how do we represent these vowels? All I'm trying to say is that "/eI/" and "/oU/" are probably less apt to cause confusion in such contexts than "/e/" and "/o/" would be. Of course this is very artificial but it's a real problem for people like the dictionary editors.<<
In this way, yes, "/eI/" and "/oU/" are suitable if one is seeking "names" for the logical phonemes in question crossdialectally, even if they might not be accurate for actually marking the specific phonemes in question in various individual dialects.
This, may, of course, be an absurdly impossible task but not entirely. It may be laxness verses tenseness which distinguishes "wet" and "wait" for you whereas for me the distinction is short vowel verses diphthong but can we not argue that my [e] and your [E] are the same phoneme and that my [{I] and your [e] are also the same phoneme?<<
Of course, this would likely require some notation for marking phonemes which is not based on what their "default" surface forms in any given dialect are, but rather is based on referring to phonemes logically in a crossdialectal fashion based on direct correlation of different forms in different dialects. Such would act to remove how linked phonemes in different dialects are actually realized at all from the picture, and limit matters to solely the common origin or correlation of the phonemes in question.
>>There will, of course be phonemes that one dialect has and another lacks but is this too great a problem? You don't have my /O/ (RP's /Q/). Can't I just say that you're missing a phoneme? Of course, it's not really that simple but maybe you see where I'm trying to get.<<
Yes, I get what you're saying. In most but not all cases, my /O/ is logically a different phoneme from your /O/, with the primary exceptions being places where RP has /Q/ and my dialect has /O/ rather than /A/.
>>Now, in a general English context how do we represent these vowels? All I'm trying to say is that "/eI/" and "/oU/" are probably less apt to cause confusion in such contexts than "/e/" and "/o/" would be. Of course this is very artificial but it's a real problem for people like the dictionary editors.<<
In this way, yes, "/eI/" and "/oU/" are suitable if one is seeking "names" for the logical phonemes in question crossdialectally, even if they might not be accurate for actually marking the specific phonemes in question in various individual dialects.