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

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.

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