Re: Analyzing Phonology

At 12:34 PM -0800 1/22/03, Arthaey Angosii wrote:
>Emaelivpar Dirk Elzinga:
>>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.
>
>T'ves emaelivpaer Jan van Steenbergen kes:
>>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.
>
>Okay, okay, you guys have bullied me into it.  ;)  I'll give
>hand-analyzation a shot and see how things go.  I do have a question though
>-- what things should I look for?  I could see, for example, what
>environments stops show up in, or where front vs back vowels are.  I'm not
>quite sure where to go from there.
Start with the basic inventory of sounds. Are there any restrictions on where sounds
can be placed? What kinds of consonant clusters are allowed? What vowels may
co-occur in the same word? Are any of the sounds pronounced in contextually
determined ways (i.e., allophony)? What about syllable structure? If a word has
more than one syllable, which syllable gets stress or accent? If there are
different syllables which can be stressed (e.g., some words have final stress,
others have penultimate stress), what determines which syllable gets stress? If
you have enough vocabulary to get meaningful numbers, finding out how frequent
different sounds are is sometimes instructive; be sure to take the phonetic
context into account when looking at that kind of thing; that is, the figures
for "p" in syllable initial position should be distinguished from "p" in
syllable final position, and so forth.

This is the kind of basic information I expect to see in the discussion of the
phonology of any language -- natural or constructed (with the exception of the
frequency counts; I think descriptive grammars *should* include this kind of
information, but not many do; hence I don't expect to see it). This kind of
information will also give you a feel for your phonological predilections.

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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