Re: Merian H-4: Grammar and Phonology.

En réponse à "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...>:

>
> 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.
>
Then how do you explain the Classical Arabic system, which always render the
bilabial stop as [b], never [p]? IIRC, saying that phonemically this is a /p/,
which just happens to be phonetically a [b], only to agree with an unclear idea
that voiced consonnants are more typologically marked than unvoiced ones
(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, which makes the reasoning circular since frequency of appearance
should be the consequence of typological markedness, not the explanation. 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.

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).

>
> > 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.
>
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).

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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