Re: Analyzing Phonology

At 11:07 AM +0000 1/22/03, Jan van Steenbergen wrote:
> --- Dirk Elzinga skrzypszy:
>
>> As a phonologist, you don't know how it pains me to hear you say this! What a
>> golden opportunity! In my own projects, I've always started with some idea of
>> what the phonology is going to be and then constructed words which conform to
>> that idea -- I've never been able to just start making words to see what
>> turned up. 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. I'd be happy to help if you had questions.
>
>I'm not sure if I agree with you, Dirk. It's true that - thanks to the List - I
>have discovered the pleasures of phonology; before that, I thought of it rather
>as a pain in the butt, an unpleasant thing that needs to be done but if
>possible limited to a minimum.
>So yes, I have been doing that, too. Simply pulling words out of the air and
>implementing them into my vocabulary for no other reason than that I liked
>them.
>Without checking or double-checking if they would fit into the undefined
>phonological rules of my language.
>But does that mean that they don't fit? I don't think so. When browsing through
>my vocabulary, I even see the opposite: they fit perfectly, maybe even better
>than many words that were created according to the rules. Because the absence
>of a clearly defined and deeply elaborated phonology does not necessarily mean
>that there is no phonology at all; on the contrary, it exists, and is alive!
>But only in one's head, on a strictly intuitive level.
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 -- not to form a "master plan" for all future
vocabulary, but to reveal to oneself one's own phonological intuitions. Think
of it as an exercise in self-discovery.

I have never worked this way, though.

>I'm sure this is the case for Arthaey as well. I just can't understand why she
>doesn't want to investigate her language manually; after all, it would be great
>fun to do so. By having it done by the computer, she misses hours of
>interesting, playful, and educative activity. My experience is that this
>activity alone creates an very good insight in how the language actually works,
>and generates hundreds of new words as a nice side-effect.
Juist.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                                               Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"It is important not to let one's aesthetics interfere with the appreciation of
fact." - Stephen Anderson

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