Re: Optimum number of symbols

Christophe wrote:
>En réponse à Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>:
> >
> > You learn something new everyday. Just to be perfectly clear: there is
> > final
> > pronounced [d] that cannot be blamed on a following, normally
> > unpronounced,
> > schwa, left there by linguistic history or later analogy?
> >
>
>I must say on this case I don't understand this question. What does
>linguistic
>history has to do with it, we're talking about synchronic phenomena?!
Well, pretty much everything in a given language at a given time is either
left there by linguistic history or later analogy. An explanation which
invoked the appearance of unpronounced phonemes where they couldn't be
explained by historical developments or analogy with other words would be
decidedly suspect.

>Whatever
>the origin of this final /d/ doesn't matter.
>It just happens to exist, and
>often can't be said to be followed by a normally unpronounced schwa (even
>if
>historically it was). Final schwas are getting rarer and rarer in French,
>which
>seems to accept more and more complicated clusters (I for instance have no
>trouble pronouncing "grande femme" [gRa~d'fam] without schwa, and I
>actually
>never pronounced it that way). So even if it was originally there, a
>synchronic
>description cannot include it, since it's actually never pronounced. It
>would
>be a rather artificial way to make this /d/ non-final just to explain why
>the
>supposed /d/ in "grand" behaves the way it does. It's an analysis which
>could
>have been correct about 50 years ago. Not anymore.
Ok. So, a word like "grand" has a bunch of allomorphs that aren't
phonologically predictable?

                                              Andreas

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