Re: THEORY: phonemics (was: RE: [CONLANG] Optimum number of symbols

Quoting And Rosta <a-rosta@...>:

> Anyway, I understand where you're coming from, but there really
> is no a priori reason to think that unconditioned allophony
> within a given position must be within a continuous or
> intensionally definable range; in principle, [s] and [m] could
> be allophones of the same phoneme, and if that is vanishingly
> rare, it is merely because it is a historical improbability,
> not a phonological impossibility.
But "historical improbabilities" are a function of a set of
distinct synchronic circumstances. IMHO it is very difficult
to maintain that any phone can pattern along with any other
phone, given that empirically this simply does not occur. In
case after case, phones that are acoustically similar not only
tend to surface in complimentary distribution with one another,
but to undergo the same kinds of phonological rules.  So, even
though [h] and [N] in English are in complimentary distribution,
there is no reason to believe -- whether from dialectology, or
from synchronic phonological alternations -- that they are
underlying allophones of the same phoneme (whatever we might
want to call that). The fact that [s] and [m] are not usually
considered allophones of the same phoneme is therefore not an
accident.

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier          "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street   and not complete one road that has no turn"
Chicago, IL 60637     Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers

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