Re: Optimum number of symbols

Quoting Roger Mills <romilly@...>:

> >(TW)I see that I have confused, rather than enlightened, my intended
> >audience.  My point in using phonological notation rather than
> >phonetic was to reinforce the point that /d/ and /t/ constitute
> >a salient distinction in German phonology generally, outside this
> >word, and that when this distinction is neutralized, it is
> >neutralized  to one of these two phonemes, but not both.
>
> Surely native speakers of German "know" that there is a word
> {rad} and a word {rat} and that {rad} (_by rule_)> [rat] when it stands
> alone/in the nominative case, or however we want to say it.
Well, I'm not always convinced about what native speakers supposedly
have intuitions about.  For example, a similar case of neutralization
occurs in English between /t/ and /d/ intervocalically, where both
phonemes are realized as voiced flaps.  I've occassionally heard
hypercorrection when speakers wished to appear formal by eliminating
flapping, but chose the "wrong" underlying target -- /t/ instead of /d/.
(Can't think of a good example off the top of my head.)  My phonology
professor, a native speaker of Icelandic, was telling me just the other
day that he always finds discussions of Icelandic prosody odd, considering
that he appears to have no intuitions at all about secondary stress,
despite the fact that Icelandic is regularly described as *having*
secondary stress.  If the speaker has no intuitions about something,
and something is as thorny phonetically as stress, how can you make
any kind of analysis of it at all?

> (Other aspects of one's language may very well be stored in a "list"--
> Engl.
> irregular verbs or plurals, for ex., where forms are not predictable.)
>
> It's certainly true that neutralization-- even in such a relatively
> transparent case as final-devoicing-- was a problem for phonemics.  (Along
> with such things as French [gra~, gra~d]  et al.)
What's weirder is that the classical Structuralist notion of the
archiphoneme appears actually to be the most straightforward analysis
in some circumstances.  In Turkish, for example, some words have
neutralization of /t/ and /d/, and yet other words, with exactly the
same conditioning environments, do not undergo a change from the UR:

(A) alternating root-final plosive:
    [kanat]    'wing'      [kanadM]  'wing-ACC'
    [kanatlar] 'wing-PL'   [kanadMm] 'wing-1Sg'
(B) nonalternating voiceless plosive:
    [sanat]    'art'       [sanatM]  'art-ACC'
    [sanatlar] 'art-PL'    [sanatMm] 'art-1Sg'
(C) nonalternating voiced plosive:
    [etyd]     'etude'     [etydy]   'etude-ACC'
    [etydler]  'etude-PL'  [etydym]  'etude-1Sg'

So, the distinction seems to be:

/T/ (capital underspecified 't') : /t/ : /d/

=====================================================================
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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