Re: back-working phonemic inventories

On Wednesday, May 18, 2005, at 10:24 , Roger Mills wrote:

> Nic Walker wrote:
>> Could anyone "back-work" (i.e. relate) these two phonemic inventories,
>
> Without examples, or some text, to see where/how the various phones occur,
>  I
> don't think it's possible.
I do not think so either.

[snip]
> (I've assumed the inventories below are phonetic, since you use [ ]; if
> they're meant to be phonemic (should be /../)
Quite so. I assume that we ae being asked to work out the phonemic
inventories of the two languages from their phonetic inventories. But
given only that lang B is derived lang A, there is simply insufficient
evidence to derive any secure phonemic inventories. To do so we do need to
know the contexts in which the phones occur.

Ray
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