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Re: Optimum number of symbols

From:Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Friday, May 24, 2002, 1:50
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