Re: Phonetic scripts and diphthongs ...

Andreas Johansson wrote:
> It occured to me that, as far as the Latin script is concerned, even
> orthographies that are otherwise adhering closely to a 1-to-1
> phoneme-grapheme mapping, phonemic diphthongs are typically spelt
> with digraphs. The cases I can think of where diphthongs are written
> with a single letter (surely, that ought to be a "mongraph"? :) )
> seem all to be ones where the orthography goes back to a time when
> the present diphthongs were monophthongs (English comes to mind).
>
> The reason, I guess, isn't really profound - being compound
> phonemes, they get compound graphemic representation. But the same
> applies to affricates, and single letters for affricates are all
> over the place; English supplies 'j' for /dZ/ (a case where IPAoid
> phonemic representation is _farther_ from the 1-to-1 ideal than the
> much-maligned English orthography).
It's not only the case in the affricates, but also in other
combinations, e.g. the combinations of stop + /r/, or of stop + /l/,
etc. These could as well be considered to be single 'phonemes' (note
that there's at least one script that treats the combinations of stop
+ /r/ as single letters, the deutsche Einheitskurzschrift ['German
standard shorthand']).

I've always thought it's a problem of the notion of 'phoneme' that it
only applies to sounds of the same complexity, since it assumes that
there's no further division of the examined sounds. So _die_ and _tie_
form a minimal pair because they share the same complexity: one sound
only, but _die_ and _dry_ don't, because tradition says they don't
have the same complexity (one sound: /d/ vs. two sounds /dr/). But why
couldn't the pair _die_ vs. _tie_ be analysed as having different
complexities: one sound /d/ vs. two sounds /dh/? It'd be all analogous
to _die_ vs. _dry_.

> Anyone's got any thoughts as to the possible causes of this apparent
> asymmetry?
>
> Or is it just an accident of the development of the Latin script?
Exactly. I believe it's a peculiarity of the English alphabet that
certain affricates are represented by single letters. This is only
because historically, they were single sounds. English /dZ/ was once
[j]. In German, e.g., you see that certain affricates are represented
with single letters (<z> [ts], and in alemannic German <k> [kx]), but
others are represented with compound letters (<pf> [pf], and <tsch>
[tS]). The other English affricate, /tS/, is represented by a digraph,
<ch>.

> What about other phonemic scripts? How do Indic scripts go about
> indicating diphthongs, for instance? Affricates?
The devanagari script, at least, has single representations for /ai/
and /au/, and these come from old representations of long diphthongs
/a:i/ and /a:u/, whereas the original short diphthongs /ai/ and /au/
are nowadays the normal letters for /e:/ and /o:/. It has no letters
for affricates, so they must be represented with ligatures and count
as compound of two 'phonemes'.

g_0ry@_ˆs:
j. 'mach' wust

Replies