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Re: OT: Definitely Not YAEPT: English phoneme inventory?

From:Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>
Date:Thursday, July 17, 2003, 23:28
Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> The lexicon of a language is never infinite. So it's normal that you can > find phonemes that don't have any contrastive minimal pair. So that > argument is actually a weak one when you search for phonemes. It's > sufficient, but certainly *not* necessary. On the other hand, the speaker's > intuition is a *very* good argument when looking for phonemic distinctions, > and unless you have *very* good reasons to doubt it (and the absence of a > minimal pair in the current lexicon of the language is *not* a good > argument), it is proof enough.
But even without minimal pairs, if you can find two sounds in the same *environment* that would be enough to call them phonemes. E.g., if I understand the rules for [O]-[o] correctly, [o] is used in open syllables, [O] in closed. (My apologies if I'm mistaken) If you could find a word with [0] in an open syllable, or [o] in a closed syllable, that would proof of phonemicity. [h]-[N] is a non-argument because they're radically different sounds. [o] and [O] are both back rounded vowels varying only in height. Personally, I don't see any reason not to have more than one definition of phoneme, such that under one definition, [o] and [O] would be analyzed as one phoneme in French, and under another as two. -- "There's no such thing as 'cool'. Everyone's just a big dork or nerd, you just have to find people who are dorky the same way you are." - overheard ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-Name: NikTaylor42

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Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>