Re: CHAT: Parallelism

Ed Heil wrote:

> 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.
FWIW, unless my professor was just being malicious (which is
possible, I suppose :) ), we learned the same thing in my phonetics
class last year.

I think all it shows is that the concept of a phoneme is just an idealization,
but a necessary and useful one, just like in metaphysics assuming
that everything your senses tell you is more or less true -- you can't
make much sense of things otherwise.

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
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<http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."

"Things just ain't the way they used to was."
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