Re: Phoneme Analysis Question

On Sun, 17 Oct 2004 11:46:09 +0600, Joseph Fatula <joefatula@...> wrote:
> I'm working on describing the phonemic inventory of a language, and I've got
> a (probably stupid) question:
>
>    If two phonemes have the same phonetic realization in a particular
> environment, how do you determine which a word has if it has that
> environment?
In general I think this is where archiphonemes come in, where neutralization of
contrast between phonemes occurs.

> Consider "fair, bear, chair, hare, very".  In my idiolect at least, short E
> and long A are two separate phonemes, but before R they have the same
> phonetic realization.  I realize this isn't the case for many of you, but
> it's just an example.
For this problem though, even though I seem to have the same vowels as you, I
wouldn't consider any of those words to have a long A. If there ever was a long
A there, it long ago merged with short E. I would put long A before R in words
like "Beirut", or in compound words like "payroll".

> Or consider the T phoneme being realized phonetically as a D after a
> stressed vowel and before another vowel (again, in my idiolect, I realize it
> doesn't apply to many of you).  In the word "atom", it's phonetically D, but
> in "atomic", it's phonetically T.  This one I can confidently assign to the
> T phoneme, in that I have a variant of the word with the D-realization
> environment and a variant without.
Again in this case, I've found it easier to apply a rule that turned /t/ to /d/ in
that position (which /d/ is then realized as [4]). To me it's just phonemic
alternation, like that between "wife" and "wives", or "divine" and "divinity".
I believe the OED also uses /d/ to describe it.

> What about a word where I don't have a
> varying pair like this?  (And where the spelling doesn't indicate a
> historical pronunciation before merger...)
If one form changes to another (like t and d) then you can assign "t" as the base
form when you have historical cause, and "d" otherwise (which is more faithful
to the actual sound). That's if you want to be morphophonemic (giving a
morpheme a consistent shape, when the phonemes allow). If you just want to be
phonemic (giving phonemes a consistent shape), you would probably use "d" in
all places.

	*Muke!
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