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

On Tue, 21 May 2002 01:27:25 +0100, And Rosta <a-rosta@...> wrote:
>
>1. I reject the classical notion of a phoneme inventory, because there are
>different sets of contrasting segments for different phonotactic positions
>(e.g. syllable-initial and syllable-final). Criteria for identifying
>members of different sets with one another rest on a set of rather
>woolly criteria involving some notion of phonetic similarity or details
>of morphological alternations. If the phoneme inventory is to be
established
>by rigid application of the principle of contrast, then the total
>phoneme inventory should consist of the separate inventories for
>the different phonotactic positions, with phonotactic position treated
>as a phonological feature of each phoneme.
>
>2. The more usual objection to phonemics (as I gather most of us know;
>please don't take my explanation to be patronizing) is that it overly
>privileges the segment. A full analysis of a phonological structure
>requires recognizing elements both below the level of the segment (i.e.
>structure internal to the segment) and above the level of the segment
>(e.g. at rime, syllable, foot level). So, to answer Julien, the
>validity of the segment is not being denied; what is being denied
>is its privileged, 'emic', status. To my mind, Julien wrongly
>takes 'phoneme' to mean 'phonological segment'; 'phoneme' carries
>extra theoretical baggage with it.
>
>I do fully accept that phonemics is a very useful tool for creating
>writing systems -- indeed, that was the driving force behind the
>early development of phonemic analysis. But as I said in another
>message, the writing systems that result are practical but kludgey,
>especially at the conceptual level.
>
>--And.


I am intrigued by your rejection of the notion of the phoneme, and
what it suggests in the way of producing a phonological decription
of a given language, but I am still a little unclear in a few areas.
The following are the questions foremost in my mind:

(1) In a given language, each phonotactic position will specify
a set of contrastive phonological segments.  I am gathering that
each contrastive phonological segment in a given set/phonotactic
position will be invariant to about the same degree that a phone
is invariant in a classical phonemic description of a language.
Is this correct?

(2) If my assumption in (1) is correct, would you object to
referring to the 'contrastive phonological segment' simply as the
'phone', as long as we carefully stipulate that nothing analogous
to the allophone of phonemic theory exists here?  After all,
it seems to me that your sets are indeed composed of phones.

(3) If such an approach is to be useful in producing a phonological
description of a given language, it seems to me that you would have
to exhaustively identify and name every unique phonotactic position
in the language.  I am rather unclear as to how we would economically
go about identifying and naming every such position.

(4) Assuming that (3) is resolved in some manner, do you have any
feeling as to the relative efficiency of describing the phonology
of a given language using your approach in comparison to using
the approach of phonemic theory, generally speaking?  In other words,
which approach in general can be expected to produce the smaller
number of production rules?


Regards

---   Mike

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