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Re: OT: Phonetics (IPA)

From:Julien Eychenne <je@...>
Date:Thursday, July 17, 2003, 21:25
Hi,

Andreas Johansson a écrit :
> So what would be the problem with analyzing an acoustical affricate as two > phonemes? I've seen _unitary_ phones analyzed as phonemic clusters in a > variety of languages (eg [S] as /sj/ in Japanese).
I see no problem at all, and one should not pay too much attention to acoustics (or at least one should consider phonology first). I strongly believe that phonology is grounded into acoustics, but there is (or must be) in the mind a core phonological level where there are only formal objects (whatever they are : articulatory manoeuvres, acoustic effects...). For instance, french vowels are considered by several authors (including my director) as being /VN/ underlyingly. Even when they appear as true nasal vowels as in Standard French (e.g. _cousin_ [kuzE~] "cousin", while Midi French has [kuzE(~)_N]), there are arguments for considering them as VN sequences : the feminine of "cousin" is _cousine_ [kuzin(@)], vowels are systematically decomposed as VN when they are borrowed, even for oral borrowings (there is an interesting study of the phenomenon within the framework of the Theory of Constraints and Repair Strategies)... So, acoustics are by no means a perfect mirror of the phonological pattern of a language. Julien. -- "Well be a lot longer discovering the future if we dont recover the past" John Anderson