Re: CHAT: Parallelism

Nik Taylor wrote:

> Ed Heil wrote:
>
> That doesn't mean that phonemes don't exist!  As you pointed out,
> there are three fairly pure tones.  Those are the defining
> characteristics of the word.  However, they're quite brief,
> especially stops, far too brief to perceive, so humans use that
> noise to figure out what the sounds are.  [b] [a] [d] do exist,
> but we infer the consonants that from the "noise" surrounding the
> vowel.
If I can identify a word by listening to X, but not by listening to
Y, it seems perverse to insist that Y is signal and X is noise.

But you seem to have firm opinions on this, and all I have is a
half-remembered anecdote, so I am not prepared to argue it.

Ed Heil ------ edheil@postmark.net
--- http://purl.org/net/edheil ---