Re: Analyzing Phonology

Dirk Elzinga wrote:
I feel in my heart of hearts that should someone work this way,
>>> the resulting phonology would be completely natural and idiosyncratic --
a
>>> true reflection in speech sounds of a person's esthetic. You stand on
the
>>> brink of this amazing discovery; I urge you to reconsider your distaste
of
>>> phonology and find out what you have. I think that the process would be
>>> illuminating.
This is true, and interesting from a psychological POV; but in many cases, I
suspect the process of "pulling words out of the air" is inspired by having
heard/read some foreign language that seemed neat, so there is liable to be
an unconscious bias.  One of my early efforts (age 14/l5 or so) was infected
with the Latin virus, with a bit of Sanskrit on the side-- there was a
|b:bh| contrast, but no other voiced aspirates (also |m:mh| but no others);
some but not all vowels could be long; the weird syllabary included a
character for |nigi| but AFAIR that was the only occurrence of |g|. But of
course, as you suggest, such inconsistencies are part of the charm of this
method.

>Actually we do agree. My point was that taking this list of words, which
was arrived at intuitively and without conscious design, and subjecting it
to phonological analysis would in fact reveal just the kinds of
consistencies that you talk about. The exercise of bringing these
consistencies to consciousness is a worthwhile thing to do in itself --

Also, it's quite analogous to a linguist in the field, starting work on an
unknown language.  You have to start by collecting a lot of individual
vocab. items, in all their phonetic variation, hopefully finding at least
some minimal pairs, after which you can start trying to figure out the
system.  Are the stops really aspirated, or is it just optional?  Is this
rare [æ] I'm hearing really contrastive, or an allophone of something?  Once
you have the glimmerings of a system, you're able to suggest possible
minimal pairs-- "you said [æSi] means 'nose', is there a word [æsi]? [aSi]?
etc. etc.  It's a fascinating process (especially when you inadvertantly
propose a naughty or taboo form!!)

(In Indonesia I used a _long_ wordlist to elicit data; in a few cases,
rushed for time, the informant was good enough to fill it in (fortunately,
most of them knew how to romanize their languages, more or less :-)  )--
there was a section of body parts/sexual terms which some informants
omitted, but one man filled it in completely.  Most of the words were
clearly "real" lexical items, but for 'penis' he gave a phrase that meant "I
don't need it".  Very strange, and I didn't have time to get back to him.)

It would of course be foolish to start by asking "how do you say 'that dog
my brother gave me is very vicious'"-- chances are you wouldn't have the
vaguest idea how to segment the reply.

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