Re: Phonologies
| From: | Trebor Jung <treborjung@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, March 7, 2004, 14:14 |
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Merhaba!
James wrote:
"David Peterson mentioned in his explanation of his first conlang that: 1.)
Though it had a large "phonology", it wasn't a phonology at all: It was just
a list of sounds.
"Being rather new at this, I don't understand the difference. So, could
someone explain what a phonology *is* and what it's supposed to *do*?"
A phonology is the sound system of a language. This encompasses phoneme
inventory, syllabic structure, phonological constraints, and the like. It
makes a language speakable.
A phoneme is a minimal contrastive sound unit; in English, [m] and [b] are
phonemes: 'mat' vs. 'bat'. A phone is a particular realization
(pronunciation) of a phoneme. A phone is not a phoneme because it does not
distinguish words: Spanish has /b/ with allophones [b] and [B]. /b/ is a
phoneme, but [B] is not: it does not make a difference in meaning (and it
only occurs in certain environments). Thus, it is called a phone. Allophones
are the actual phones of a phoneme; 'phone' is a term referring to all such
noncontrastive sound units (or at least, it's how I interpret things).
Hope this helps.
--Trebor
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