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

En réponse à Mark J. Reed :


>Hearing a distinction doesn't make it phonemic.  Show me a minimal pair. :)
This kind of arguments leads directly to the "heng" phoneme, i.e. that [h] 
and [N] are a single phoneme because there is no minimal pair distinguished 
by only those sounds. That's nonsense. The speakers intuition is a *very* 
big part in recognising what is a phoneme and what is not in a language. 
Minimising that will result in such nonsense. For instance, although there 
is no minimal pair in French for the contrast /o/-/O/, they are still 
phonemes because if you give a French person the made-up word [noR], that 
person will always recognise that it's different from /nOR/: North and will 
not confuse them (that person will never even say: "oh, you mean [nOR]! 
Youve got a strange accent!" when hearing it. They will simply say: "that 
word doesn't exist". Ask my friend. He complains often enough that when he 
makes a small mistake - in his opinion - about the pronunciation of a word, 
people don't understand what he means. The mistakes he is talking about are 
exactly of the [noR] vs. [nOR] type). And if asked to write down [noR], 
that person will probably write "naure", showing (since "au" is always /o/) 
that they recognised what sound it was.

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.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

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