Re: [Re: [IE conlangs]]

Edward Heil wrote:
> When you hear a word b-n, where - represents a
> vowel that you couldn't quite make out, you have the following possibilities:
> bin, been
Those two being homophones in Southern American English, /bIn/, of
course.  :-)

> English does not come close
> to fully exploiting its phonological inventory, which means that some of the
> information conveyed phonetically is redundant and dispensable without loss of
> understanding.
That's true of most languages, at least on the level or words.

> So between incompletely exploited phonological inventory and the redundancy
> provided by context, just about any phonological component can be seen as
> dispensable.  And that gives enough leeway that if somebody else realizes a
> certain group of phonemes differently than you do, you can guess what he meant
> via the built-in redundancy of language, and then learn his mapping of
> phonemes to phones and how it's different than yours very quickly.  Especially
> since the differences between dialects tend to be very systematic!
Quite true, that's the reason for this redundancy, of course.  But,
altho dialectal differences *tend* to be systematic, there are often
many non-systematic differences as well.  "Get", for instance, is
pronounced /gIt/ in the South, while it is /gEt/ in most other dialects
(at least according to Webster's), but "bet" is still /bEt/.  That is,
there's no general /E/ --> /I/ rule (except before nasals) in Southern
American English.

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