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Re: E and e (was: A break in the evils of English (or, Sturnan is beautiful))

From:Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Date:Monday, May 6, 2002, 14:46
Tristan wrote:

>> >Consider an hypothetical language. It has the following consonants: >> >[x s t_D p] (and no others). None are allophones for the other; each are >> >individual sounds. Nor do any have any (important) allophones. What is >> >the primary distinction between [x] and [p]? POA or TOA? Should they be >> >phonematicised as /x/ and /k/ or /k/ and /p/? Or as /x/ and /p/
^^^^^^^^ /x/ and /k/? That I don't understand. Using the criteria in Pike's "Phonemics" (as best I recall them) one would simply go with / p t s x / -- to say that [x] was phonemic /k/ would be introducing an unwarranted level of abstraction, and to include the information "dental" or "D-offglide" with /t/ is unnecessary-- such information belongs in the description of how the phonemes are realized phonetically. If you can find a copy of Pike's book, it's full of interesting questions and problems to solve. A slightly greater problem in phonemics arises when a language has, say, [f] in a certain number of specifiable environments, and [p] in a certain number of different envinronments -- and you have concluded that they represent a single phoneme. How to symbolize it? /p/ with [p ~f] allophones? or /f/ with [p ~f] allophones? In one sense, it wouldn't matter; but then some linguistic rules of thumb (or "universal tendencies" if you will) come into play. It is more common for languages to have only a stop system (with fricative allophones), than to have only a fricative system (with stop allophones)-- so you would call the phoneme /p/.
>Can anyone think of a word that has <ors(C)#>, where the <or> is any >sequence of sounds that would render as /O:/ other than <au>-style >things, <s> is unvoiced, C is an unvoiced stop and # the end of a >syllable other than 'Forster'? It might help prove or disprove whether >the 'r' is completely gone when the next sound is a consonant, or if >it's just a phonemic rendering. (I'm excluding 'Forster' because it's a >name and has the conflicting 'Foster'.)
Do Forster and Foster contrast for you, or are they the same? I'd guess Forster might have a longer vowel, or a schwa offglide??? There aren't many other ...orsC# words, and they tend to be past tense forms, like forced, coursed, (contrast with "cost"?); a few more -ors# horse, force, course, gorse, source (vs. sauce?), Morse (vs. moss?), Norse; and lots with -orC#

Replies

John Cowan <jcowan@...>Pike's _Phonemics (was: E and e)
Tristan <zsau@...>