|Submitter Email:||click here to access email| A few days ago, I
posted a question about the transcription of American
pronunciation. This arose out of the decision of the editors of
the Oxford English Dictionary to transcribe the American
''tapped /t/'' (''flapped /t/'') with the symbol /d/, thus
making the transcription of 'atom', for example, identical to
that of 'Adam'. I expressed my disapproval of this decision, and
asked for the views of I received replies from 50 people, most
(but not all) of them linguists or phoneticians, and most (but
not all) of them native speakers of American English. In
addition, two respondents consulted friends or spouses who had
no linguistic training, giving a total of First, I have tried to
classify the respondents according to their opinion of the OED's
decision -- with a little difficulty in a few cases. Here are
the numbers. 37 Utterly hostile to the use of /d/ 7 Skeptical
about /d/, but not wholly hostile 1 Sympathetic, but still
skeptical 3 Sympathetic to the use of /