[Re: [IE conlangs]]

Gary Shannon <reboot@...> wrote:
> As a non-linguist, and especially a non-phonologist, I wonder at all th=
e
> infinitesimal distinctions that are made concerning vowel sounds. Engli=
sh as
> spoken in London, New Jersey, Bombay, and by people with any one of a n=
umber
> of different "foreign" accents are all radically different in terms of =
the
> exact nature of the vowel sounds.  Yet each of these variations can be
> easily understood by most English speakers.  Such subtle nuances of
> pronunciation seem, therefore, to have exactly zero information content=
=2E
> (Other than to identify the nationality of the speaker.)
Well, by definition, a non-phonemic distinction carries no information.

But one thing you have to remember is that there is tremendous redundancy=
 in
language as it is pronounced.  When you hear a word b-n, where - represen=
ts a
vowel that you couldn't quite make out, you have the following possibilit=
ies:
bin, been, bane, ban, bone, bon (as in bonbon), bun, boon.  You don't hav=
e the
options of "boon" (like "book" but with an n), "boin," or "bown" (rhyming=
 with
"down"), even though those are phonetically possible, because they don't
happen to exist as words in the English language.  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 lo=
ss of
understanding.

When you take context into account, the redundancy grows much greater.  I=
f the
sentence you heard was  "Put the paper in the recycle b-n", then the vowe=
l is
completely redundant with the context -- you don't need to hear the vowel=
 at
all to know that "bin" is the word intended.  In fact, it would be fairly=

difficult to come up with a context that did *not* render the information=

conveyed by the vowel in "b-n" =


So between incompletely exploited phonological inventory and the redundan=
cy
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.  Espec=
ially
since the differences between dialects tend to be very systematic!

So I don't think this is anything special about vowels -- it's a matter o=
f the
general flexibility we have in language interpretation.


> English, at least, would appear to be very tolerant of variety in vowel=
> sounds.  Are other languages this tolerant, or are there languages in w=
hich
> slight mispronunciations would confuse the meaning of a sentence?
I imagine things are trickier in languages with much smaller phonetic
inventories, like Chinese, which are forced to almost completely exploit =
their
phonetic inventories.  You'd still have redundancy due to context in such=

languages, but much less built in phonetic redundancy.  But I'm no expert=
 in
Chinese!


> My own pet theory is that vowels sounds are important, but only just ba=
rely.

This will vary from language to language, I'm sure -- considering that th=
ere
are languages with as few as one vowel and languages with many more than
English (and English has quite a few, despite having only five vowel symb=
ols!)

> (My own conlang, Tazhi, is set in a parallel world where it is a global=
> language
> with many local variations in pronunciation which are all ultimately
> unimportant.)
>
> Anyway, the reason I bring all this up is that it seems to me that any
> candidate for a global language must be a some language which is extrem=
ely
> tolerant of various types of "mispronunciation".  How do languages othe=
r
> than English stack up in this regard?
Heheheheheh...  See the early archives of the Conlang list, which are ful=
l of
arguments between auxlangers about the Perfect Internatural Auxiliary
Language, for lots on this topic. :)

http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Lab/1635/clang

Ed


---------------------------------------------------------
Edward Heil .......................... edwardheil@usa.net
---------------------------------------------------------

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