Re: Merian H-4: Grammar and Phonology.

Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:

> En réponse à "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...>:
>
> >
> > Joe, one word about natural languages.  Usually, when languages
> > acquire a distinction, they apply that distinction to a whole
> > class of sounds.  So, for example, if you get affrication on
> > /p/ to get /p_f/, you'll also find affricates /t_T/ or /t_s/
> > and /k_x/. So, let's look at your system:
> >
> >   p     t d       c      k g
> >   f v             x
> >                                 h
> >                          (q)
> >   m                 n
> >
> > This is a little anomalous in several ways. It's not weird for
> > a language to have a voiceless /p/ without a voiced /b/ (in
> > fact, that's the more unmarked system)
>
> Actually, it's the contrary. It's more natural for a language to have
> /b/ without /p/ then the contrary. It's also more natural for a language
> to have /k/ without /g/.
Note that I was talking about *phonology*, not phonetics.  That's
important: we're talking about the distribution of sounds in the
language, because that affects what kinds of distinctions the
speaker *needs* to make. When a language has one series of stops
at labial, alveolar and velar positions, we can call them whatever
we want, because there is ipso facto no distinction, and
phonetically these languages in fact tend to have very short
voice-onset times, either positive or negative (i.e., they will
sound very much like plain [p t k]) because they do not need to
make those differences.  When you introduce a second series, the
speakers tend to make these just distinct enough to hear, and tend
to make them equidistant in terms of positive or negative VOT.
All of this means that voicing (i.e. distinctly negative VOT) is
typologically more marked, and that a system which has distinctly
voiced segments but lacks a unvoiced counterpart is itself
typologically marked.

> In fact, Classical Arabic is an example of that,
> having the following set of stops: b t d k (no p nor g).
>
> >
> > It's not strange that you would have [A] for /a/ and
> > [Q] for /o/, but it is a little odd that you would have
> > two *rounded* front vowels with no unrounded counterparts --
> > the former generally imply the presence of the latter.
>
> In fact, I know of no language that has front rounded vowels without
> the corresponding front unrounded ones.
Um, right.  That's what I said.

> On the other hand, languages with back unrounded vowels lacking the
> corresponding back rounded ones are frequent (take simply Japanese,
> which has /M/ - high back unrounded - without its rounded
> variant /u/).
I wouldn't say that at all:  [u] as a value for /u/ is very,
very frequent, with roughly 1/4 of the languages of the world
having an [i e a o u] system alone.  I would not say that back mid
or high unrounded vowels are rare, exactly, but they are certainly
not "frequent" except in an absolute sense of having hundreds of
languages with them.  For the same reason, front mid or high rounded
vowels are not rare but not relatively common, either:  unroundedness
seems to be a marker of frontness, while roundedness seems to be a
marker of backness.

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier>

             "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street   and not complete one road that has no turn"
Chicago, IL 60637     Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers

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