Re: Optimum number of symbols

Quoting Roger Mills <romilly@...>:

> Ray Brown wrote:
>
>
> >At 10:44 pm -0500 21/5/02, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
> >[snip]
> >>
> >>Actually, I was referring to different forms:  <Rad> and <Rat>
> >>are homophonous in the singular, and yet are phonologically
> >>distinct in the plural:  <Räder> /RE:d@/ and <Räter> /RE:t@/.
> >>This does bear on the criticism of a true phonemic system, since
> >>a true phonemic system will fail to capture phonological
> >>neutralizations like that in the German data I presented.
> >>That is, /Rat/ is really two distinct words: /Rat/-1 and /Rat/-2,
>
> Quite so.
> >Surely, phonemically they are /ra:d/ and /ra:t/ respectively, tho both
> >pronounced [ra:t], since in syllable final position /d/ is pronounce [t].
>
> The first person to suggest that to the early phonemicists was drummed out
> of the corps for introducing an "abstraction", I think.  The generative
> idea of underlying (abstract) forms, operated on by a series of ordered
> rules, was IMO a great improvement, even though Chomsky and Halle carried
> it a little too far.
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.  I was not
refering to a kind of Chomskyan underlying specification per se,
which would surely posit something like /Rad/ and /Rat/.

> >But the falling together of final /t/ and /d/ is one of those awkward
> >features that in my view suggests the phonemic analysis does not tell us
> >the whole story.
>
> All too true.
>
> Slightly off the subject-- Perhaps our high-school Latin teachers didn't
> want to trouble our little minds with details, but it strikes me now that a
> lot of the bothersome "irregular" forms could have been explained more
> simply by introducing us to a few rules and a little linguistic history:
> e.g. the root of lex/legis is /leg-/, the nom. has |x| /ks/ simply because
> of required devoicing.  (and sim. in related lego, -ere, lectus); and the
> addition (actually dropping) of -t- in all those participles in /-ns ~ntis
This is indeed how I viewed such morphophonemic alternations when I took
Latin in HS, though I didn't have the formalism at hand to describe in
such a way at that time.

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