Re: Phonologies

Sandat David Peterson:
> (Before I begin,  when I hit "reply" to this e-mail, it brought up your personal
 >address, James, and not the CONLANG address.  I forget what this is a
symptom of.)

I don't know about this one.


> Actually, this is presupposing something here.  When I say "phonology", I mean
> "natural phonology", and what I mean by "natural phonology", is a phonology like
> that of an natural language, and there don't happen to be any natural languages on
 >Earth where you can learn to speak the language (or read it aloud)
just by knowing
 > how to produce a list of sounds.

I was hoping for an explanation of naturalistic phonologies. :) My new
project, emindahken (was Mindakh), actually has a conculture associated
with it, unlike my first lang (Orēlynna--actually Mindakh was first, but
got put on hold while I worked on O.).

> Also, there are no languages where every phoneme corresponds to exactly one phone
 > (all explain this later, if it's vague now).

OK. I guess I knew this, but in both of my projects so far I have had
one phone per phoneme, since it was tidier than figuring out allophones.
Perhaps I should look into naturalizing the system, since that would be
appropriate for emindahken.

> *HOWEVER*, I think it might be safe to assume that an *ideal* phonology would,
 > in fact, be a list of sounds.

But what in this (or any) world is _Ideal_? :)

[snip Hawaiian and Zhyler descriptions]


> Looking over this, I'm not sure if I answered your question very directly (or at
 > all).

Actually, you helped a lot. This has shown me that I need to pursue the
study of this a bit in order to make my languages more naturalistc.

 >I think the main point is that a speaker of a language (and a listener)
 >will not attach meaning to a sound, but to a phoneme.  A given phoneme
may have only
 >one phonetic realization (like /p/ in Hawaiian), but it may also have
more (like /e/,
 >in Hawaiian).  Just because it has more than one sound associated with
it, though,
 >doesn't mean you want to associate meaning to those particular sounds.
  So, even
 >though Hawaiian has the sounds /e/ and /E/, you wouldn't want to say
that a speaker
 >of Hawaiian would say that /kEni/ and /keni/ are different.

Aha! I see what I have been doing. In Orēlynna I have short and long
vowels, but they are phonemic. I'm sure there are natlangs that
distinguish long & short phonemically, but my long & short started out
more as allophones, I guess, for when 2 of the same vowels appeared
together due to morphological constructions. I then decided to
phonemicize (is that a word?) them.

emindahken has vowel length as well as rounding, all phonemicized. Maybe
  instead of that (or along with it) I can allow some of them to shift
under certain circumstances. Hmm.

 > To a Hawaiian speaker,
 >these would map onto the same word: "keni" (or "kene").  In English,
though, you
 >might say that the first would be the name "Kenny" and the second
"caney" (relating
 >to canes?).  There are some extra phonetic differences when going from
these examples
 >to English, but the point is that in English we do attach special
meaning to the
 >difference between /e/ and /E/, whereas Hawaiian speakers don't.  This
is the type of
 >thing you want to capture in a realistic phonology.  If you want to
get a better idea
 >of what different phonologies do, you might start looking at them, or
looking at the
 >phonologies of the languages you know.

I will do that. Thanks for the enlightenment.
====================================================
Sandat Trebor Jung:

 > 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).


Thanks. Especially the allophone part. I haven't been able to clearly
grasp* that concept until now.

*Split-infinitive proscriptivists need not comment. :)) (I could just
call it a phrasal verb :) )
--
=============
James Worlton
          "We know by means of our intelligence
          that what the intelligence does not
          comprehend is more real than what it
          does comprehend."
                           --Simone Weil

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