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

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Thursday, July 17, 2003, 20:08
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.

Replies

Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>
Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>