Re: Merian H-4: Grammar and Phonology.

On Thu, 27 Dec 2001 17:26:05 +0100, Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:

>Then how do you explain the Classical Arabic system, which always render
the
>bilabial stop as [b], never [p]?
I am curious to hear what Thomas has to say, but I have an objection here,
too.

In short, "never say never". If, for some historical reasons, a language
lacks a particular combination of distinctive features that are otherwise
active in its phonology, this doesn't necessarily mean that the language
in question *forbids* such a combination. Moreover, it is unlikely that
its speakers will necessarily identify (and substitute) such a combination
(e. g. in a foreign word) with some other, better represented one.

Classical Arabic is known from texts written in an alphabet having no
letter for [p]. OTOH it seems that most (if not all) of the modern Arabic
dialects do allow [p] (as well as [v], etc.) in borrowings.

I think [p] in Arabic is a typical example of "potential phoneme".

And I think real bans for phonemization of gap-filling sounds
have to be conditioned by some rather special circumstances (like the lack
of an appropriate letter - for a *standard literary dialect*).

>IIRC, saying that phonemically this is a /p/,
>which just happens to be phonetically a [b],
I agree that this would be nonsene - if the system has e. g. [d] opposed
to [t]. But such a statement may make sense if your stops don't support the
phonological opposition of voice at all (within a theoretical paradigm I'm
not especially fond of, though).

>only to agree with an unclear idea
>that voiced consonnants are more typologically marked than unvoiced ones
It seems to me that what Thomas meant was, above all, absence/presence of
an opposition (of voice, in his examples), and little probability of
certain features when not supported by the whole phonological system.

That is, if you don't have such an opposition, you'll probably have only
the voiceless stops (I would add: word-initially), since there's no reason
within the system to use voiced stops, which would be anthropophonically
more difficult.

>(something which is not proven, since until now, nobody has been able to
come
>with an explanation of typological markedness other than frequency of
>appearance,
Why? I think word-initial /b/ is simply a more difficult sound than /p/ in
the same position. After all, it's a stop, and one has to turn one's voice
on *before* releasing the air...

>which makes the reasoning circular since frequency of
appearance
>should be the consequence of typological markedness, not the explanation.
I don't see why circular *reasoning* prevents things from being *observed*.
And I don't understand why you call it circular. If markedness is the
effective *cause*, it can be evidenced by frequency as its consequence;
therefore, in a particular study you can use frequency as the logical
*reason* (or evidence) to decide on markedness (within this theoretical
framework).

>In
>other words, until now typological markedness is an empty definition
designed
>to explain frequency facts, but nobody's been able yet to fill these words
with
>any meaning) is a little stretched in my opinion. Or else everyone is wrong
>when they classify phonemes of a language into plosives, voiceless vs.
voiced,
>etc... since in phonological terms these have no meaning.
I'm not sure I understand the last sentence at all.

>It still doesn't change the fact that /p/ is typologically more marked than
/b/
>in systems having a voiceless vs. voiced distinction, since when you look
at
>the frequency of appearance of those two phonemes in languages with a
voiceless-
>voiced distinction in stops, /b/ is more frequent than /p/ (to take the
>circular definition of typological markedness that is currently used).
Don't you mix phonological and typological markedness? Systems that have
[b] without [p] are more common than systems that have [p] without [b];
but I'm not sure whether [b] is more frequent than [p] (on the average)
when both [b] and [p] are present. (At any rate, when the opposition is
exactly voiced vs. voiceless; that is, I think examples like German don't
count).

>> > 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/).
However, Japanese has also a rounded [o]. And anyway, such systems don't
seem especially *frequent*.

>> 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.
>It was frequency relative to that of rounded front vowels lacking their
>unrounded counterparts. You can't deny that while you probably can't find
>examples of languages having rounded front vowels lacking their unrounded
front
>counterparts, you can *more* easily find languages with unrounded back
vowels
>lacking their rounded counterparts (Japanese is an example with its /M/,
but
>across Asia this is a common phenomenon).
Ancient Greek? Old French before monophthongization of [ou]?

OTOH, which systems "across Asia" do you mean? The only other example (not
from Asia) which I can recall is reconstructed Proto-Slavic, and IMO this
allows more than one interpretations.

And at any rate, neither type can be compared with the "5-vowel standard".


Basilius