Re: Optimum number of symbols

En réponse à Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>:

>
> My impression is that many/most of those silent |e|'s and |s|'s,
> phonemically speaking, are still around. Can you give me a good reason
> to
> believe that, say, "grand" does not contain an underlaying /d/ that
> gets
> realized as [t] or [d] in certain circumstances?
No you can't, because final /d/ is possible in French and is normally only ever
realised as [d]. This phoneme that appears at the end of "grand" and which can
be realised as [t], [d] or disappear couldn't possibly be a /d/. The
phonotactic rules to account for the phonetic realisations in this case, while
there are others on the other cases, would finally amount as: "in the
word /gRa~d/, the final /d/ can be realised as...", "in the word...", etc...,
i.e. we sometimes would have a set of phonotactic rules for only a single word.
Making a new phoneme simply for this one wouldn't work either, since it would
make a phoneme that appears basically in one or two words and none others.
Phonemes can be more or less rare in a language, but this is a bit much :)) .
Liaison phenomena just cannot be well explained by anything having to do with
phonology. They have to be described as morphological if we don't want to
arrive at impossibilities.

>
> And no, I don't know French. I'm only pointing out what looks like a
> hole in
> your description above.
>
I just didn't make it clear that the phenomenon of liaision is not a phonetic
problem. It's just impossible to sensibly describe it that way...

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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