Re: Obsessed with Mouth Noises

The idea is not to pretend that phoneticians' work and
science is of no value at all. I myself am interested
in it, to some point. But syntax and, most of all,
semantics, are very much nearer the core of a
language. We should think seriously about phonetics
when we have already built the fundaments of the
language, and not the contrary.

By the way, it is quite possible to imagine a language
that would be only a written one, and not used for
talking; and yet it would be perfectly convenient for
exchanging information, ideas, feelings, orders or
whatever, which is the purpose of a language. You
would be terrified if you heard how french programmers
pronounce (english) words of a computer language, for
example: they just pronounce it the French way and
they don't care at all how it should be pronounced.
But this doesn't prevent them to understand exactly
what the statement does, and they can program in
Cobol, Basic, Perl or whatever just the same as their
anglo-saxon colleagues. In fact, it would be easy to
translate all English words of a computer language
into French, and the program would do exactly the
same. Instead of writing: LOOP WHILE X LOWER THAN Y,
you would write: BOUCLER TANT QUE X INFERIEUR A Y. I
can hardly see any difference (bu the way, Pick allows
such things in its query language, which is called,
either "ENGLISH", either "FRANCAIS", either whatever,
depending on the local version).

So it's just the same for a natlang, or for a conlang.
It is possible to exchange without bothering about
talking and pronunciation. It's the same for Chinese
ideograms too, AFAIK. This clearly proves that
phonology is a peripheral question, not a central one.
Of course, it can be quite interesting too, but that's
not the point. Etymology is quite interesting, yet you
can use a language for communicating without knowing
anything about its history. Most of the people do.

I guess it's just a question about somebody's goal. If
the goal is to build a language, then let's first
consider concepts, then syntax (the way to implement
concepts), then writing and phonology. If the goal is
to specialize into some very particular domain, then
let's do so.


--- David Peterson <ThatBlueCat@...> wrote:
> There are a lot of assumptions you've made that you
> might not realize you've made here.  So let's go
> through all this:
> Gary wrote:
> <<Granted, pronunciation can be interesting, but
> I'llnever understand the seeming obsession with
> trivialnuances that seems to grip some
> linguists.Pronunciation is nearly irrelevant when it
> comes tofulfilling the primary purpose of
> language;communication.>>
> Assumption Number 1: If language is only a tool for
> communication, then all linguists should be
> concerned with, with respect to phonetics, is
> whether or not person A can communicate with person
> B.  Or possibly: All phoneticians are interested
> with are dialectal differences which have no bearing
> on communication.  Both of these are, of course,
> completely untrue.  Leaving production problems
> aside (i.e., people that have to work with a speech
> pathologist in order to be able to produce
> recognizable sounds), one of the main things
> phoneticians do with their studies is make
> predictions.  These predictions can be predictions
> about why a certain sound change occurred, which
> ones are more likely to occur, what distinctions are
> unstable, etc.  Why do all this?  Well, for example,
> at one point in time, German speakers and English
> speakers spoke the same language.  Now they don't.
>  Part of this has to do with syntax, morphology,
> etc., but a lot also has to do with sound changes.
>  The w!
> ay we learn about sound changes is studying dialect
> variation that's occurring right now.  After all,
> different dialects can eventually grow into
> different languages.  Now, whether or not this whole
> realm of study is frivolous is not something that
> can really be argued, because that could lead to a
> whole discussion of, "Well, if you think *that's*
> frivolous, then what about this?"
> <<Two people walk into a restaurant.  One orders
> "frahdchikin pleez" and the other orders "vroit
> jigun pliss"and the both get the same meal delivered
> to theirtable.>>
> Let's assume your right about this.  We can extend
> this to syntax and general grammar.  A propose that
> a conlang should have no fixed grammar, but merely a
> wide range of acceptable variants.  After all, you
> can say "He went to the store", or "He go store",
> and they're both perfectly understandable to a
> native English speaker.  So why impose arbitrary
> rules such as tense, prepositions, articles, etc.?
>  If you do that, it becomes too hard to speak
> "correctly".
> One thing that the example I gave above and your
> example have in common is that they're hard to screw
> up.  If you have an idea of how the language is
> supposed to sound, you'll get it somewhat right
> (i.e., you won't say "The to went store he", or
> [vli:t s@idZo~ BjejS] ="fried chicken please").
>  What about little differences, though?  So, the
> stereotypical Hindi speaker who speaks English
> overgeneralizes the progressive, so they say things
> like, "I am thinking that's not such a good idea."
>  So, one thing such a speaker might say is, "I am
> seeing him."  Does that mean they're dating him, or
> that they can see him?  Presumably they also know
> the expression "to be seeing someone" (after all,
> we're dealing with fluent speakers who just have a
> different way of speaking, not language-learners).
>  So which is it?  Same thing with pronunciation.  I
> can't think of any examples off hand, but one
> problem that my grandmother has is she can't
> distinguish [I] and [i].  So both "seat" and "sit!
> " are pronounced [sit].  I can tell you from
> experience that there are times that I've genuinely
> been confused about what she was talking about, and
> the only reason was pronunciation.  Now, the
> difference between [i] and [I] is, quite frankly,
> really just a nuance of the mouth.  The sounds are
> *so* close that they're indistinguishable in most
> languages.  They are distinguished in English,
> though, so this little nuance of the mouth isn't
> simply a nuance.
> Also, why is it that you've only focused on
> seemingly non-native speakers?  Native speakers have
> varying pronunciations, and studying the variance
> can tell you a lot about the history of the
> language, and where the language is going.  I
> attended an interesting talk last year, in fact,
> about how there's a kind of vowel harmony developing
> in Scots English.  Did I have trouble understanding
> them?  No.  Is it important to communication?  No.
>  Is it, therefore, uninteresting, and a waste of
> time to study?  If you say "yes", then I'd really
> like to hear why.  It's a linguistic phenomenon, and
> linguists study linguistic phenomenon.  From a
> conlanging point of view, it's something that
> happens in real language, so if you want to make a
> realistic conlang, you should keep it in mind.
> But I think your main point is that there's no point
> in specifying, in a conlang, that X sound needs to
> pronounce exactly thus, and Y vowel needs to be
> pronounced in just this way.  Fair enough.  But why
> do they do it real grammars of real languages?
>  Should it be considered unimportant?  After all,
> one of the things that every good grammar will say
> right off the bat is what dialect they describe, and
> all the particulars in the grammar will be
> understood to be specific only to that dialect.
>  Would you say that they should do something else?
>  Maybe say, "In X language, you can kind of
> pronounce this vowel like this, this, this, this,
> this, this, this, this, this, and this, depending on
> where you are."  Maybe if the point was to help you
> be understood in that language, that would be fine,
> but if the point is to describe the language, then
> it would be totally irresponsible.
> <<It seems to me that it is sufficient for any
> givenlanguage to define the range of acceptable
> phoneticvalues for a given meaning and leave it at
> that.>>
> Back to conlanging, let's consider this point.  If
> you intend your conlang to be spoken by actual
> people, then, yes, maybe you might do this.  In
> fact, this is exactly the kind of thing they talk
> about on Auxlang.  When I learned Esperanto, for
> example, we were told how all the sounds should be
> pronounced, and encouraged to not pronounce them in
> an English-like manner.  In fact, for every language
> I've ever learned this has been the case.  The
> reason is that the not-100%-Esperanto-way of
> pronouncing, for example, /t/ in the U.S. (alveolar,
> aspirated), will be different from the
> not-100%-Esperanto-way of pronouncing /t/ in India
> (I'd guess that the latter'd be dental,
> unaspirated?).  Then when you consider complicated
> letters like /l/ and /r/, pretty soon you could
> imagine people not being able to understand one
> another.  Unless you're creating an IAL, though,
> you're probably imagining a conlanging audience, and
> so you can get away with giving a range of
> pronunciations for a !
> given sound.
> So that's for a language one intends to be spoken.
>  None of my conlangs (with the exception of maybe
> Kele), however, are supposed to be spoken languages.
>  I mean, they could be, but I'm not going out trying
> to recruit speakers.  So I really don't care how
> people pronounce, or what pronunciations would be
> acceptable and what wouldn't.  What I'm doing is
> describing a dialect.  (In my cases, I don't have
> concultures, so they're not dialects from particular
> groups, but any description will be of a dialect.)
>  The intent is that this is the way that some people
> would or could pronounce that language.  If I were
> to make a TY book, then I would include information
> about how a given sound could be pronounced (isn't
> that what they do, anyway?  "The dotless i in
> Turkish sounds a little bit like the 'u' in 'could',
> but less round"), and the goal would be for a native
> speaker to simply understand.  But that's not what
> my conlang descriptions are.  As for how a native
> speaker of another l!
> anguage would pronounce these sounds, while kind of
> interesting, why devote any time to it?  After all,
> it's pretty formulaic.  Like you said here:
> <<TheirEnglish was excellent but their pronunciation
> and theyway that placed accents on different
> sylables took alittle getting used to.  But once I
> go used to it theywere perfectly understandable.>>
> The reason you could get used to their pronunciation
> was because it was systematic.  To figure out how a
> native speaker of another language would pronounce a
> conlang would be a simple matter of creating a
> formula: This sound will be pronounced like this,
> this one like that, this one like that...  Further,
> if you consider all the languages in the world, you
> could probably get every sound having twenty
> different variants--maybe more.  Would you want to
> include all these in a description?  Perhaps a
> separate page devoted to each natural and created
> language?  How a native Esperanto/American
> English/British
>
English/Mandarin/Spanish/Italian/Japanese/Hawaiian/Russian/Tagalog,
> etc. speaker would pronounce X language.  I don't
> see why this would be even desirable--by anybody.
> Also, consider you're notion of a nuance of the
> mouth.  You're claim is that a native English
> speaker can understand anyone who speaks with an
> accent.  This isn't controversial: We all can do it
> (after all, we *all* speak with an accent).  You
> say, then, that since this is the case, such
> phonetics shouldn't be studied.  But notice: Don't
> you find it interesting that we *can* do this?  When
> listening to a person speaking with an accent, it
> can sound either odd or unintelligible at first, but
> after awhile, we "get used to it".  Something allows
> us to adjust to understand them, and to do so *very*
> quickly.  How the heck do we do that?  What would be
> too jumbled to adjust to?  And further, if you got
> somebody with a really thick accent (doesn't matter
> what),
=== message truncated ===


=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)

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