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Re: Terminology defs

From:Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
Date:Saturday, September 11, 1999, 19:22
Daniel Seriff wrote:

> Can anyone accurately distinguish the words "phonetic", "phonemic", and > "morphemic" for me? I've never quite gotten the exact degrees of > difference between them.
Sure. There's a natural progression in terminology here: A _phonetic_ distinction is one that is discussing the acoustic properties of sounds as absolute, scientificly verifiable units. For example, in English, the sound of /t/ in "star" is phonetically different from that in "tar", because of a difference in the level of vibration of the vocal chords when the sound is articulated (technically, the "voice-onset timing", but let's not go there); we couldn't care less about any human interpretation or social convention here. BUT: A _phonemic_ distinction is one that is taking into account what the speaker on some level thinks is necessary to distinguish when he's speaking, whether it's a meaningful distinction. So, in English, we have to distinguish between /t/ and /d/, because we know that it's important to make sure our listeners hear "dog" and not "tog". On the other hand, we don't think it's important to distinguish (and indeed, are usually entirely unaware of the distinction) between the phonetically different [t] in "star" and the [t_h] in "tar". It's simply not important for English speakers, even though plenty of other languages find it just as important as the English /t/ : /d/ distinction. Now, in all the above, when I speak of a meaningful distinction, I do not mean that there is semantic or syntactic meaning applied to the sounds. I mean only whether or not a distinction must be made just to form the word correctly, regardless of what it means. So we can say a word like "talopp", a nonsense word, but it will obey the same rules about how to articulate the phoneme /t/ at the beginning of the word, and similar rules for all the other sounds. So, the basic distinction of talking about phonemic and phonetic differences is in the level of interpretation, because both are there simultaneously, interacting with one another. A morphological distinction is different. Morphology is basically the next level up after phonemes: each morpheme not only has a set of sounds and rules to govern those sounds, but it has some sort of semantic meaning too. So, English -ly is a morpheme consisting of two phonemes /l/ and /i/, which also carries with it the syntactic connotation "I make things into adverbs". Morphemes can be either free, meaning they can sit in a sentence on their own (like "dog"), or bound, meaning they must be used in connection with a free morpheme (like the plural ending -s). But whatever the case, be they bound or free, they have some sort of meaning associated with them. ======================================================= Tom Wier <artabanos@...> ICQ#: 4315704 AIM: Deuterotom Website: <http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/> "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero." Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day. - Thomas Jefferson ========================================================