Re: alien xeno-anthropologists (was: Abkhaz)

On Sun, 8 Aug 2004 15:23:55 -0500, Caleb Hines <cph9fa@...> wrote:
> English only has one vowel,
I take this to mean "English has only one vowel phoneme"

> but it has many phonetic realizations. This
> vowel is never written in the text, but the consonants a, e, i, o, u, and
> sometimes y are silent and act as placeholders for this vowel.
This is trivially false, as "bat", "bet", "bit", "bot", and "but" have
the same structure: C1 "b", silent placeholder consonant, C2 "t".

If realisation is conditioned only on the environment and there is
only one vowel phoneme, all those words must mean the same thing.
However, they don't.

If the various written words represent syllables with different vowel
phones, and the words have different meanings, then the phones must
represent distinct phonemes, which contradicts the initial information
that there is but one phoneme.

> Under no
> condition is the choice of a placeholder consonant at all related to the
> choice of phonetic representation for the unwritten vowel. Indeed, the
> choice of phonetic realization often changes from one dialect to another.
I think I can see where this is coming from, but you'd still have a
job to convince the poor alien that there's only one phonemic vowel.

However, it might work if you change the claim to something like this:

English has only one phonemic vowel. Since there is only one vowel, it
is not necessary to write it.

However, English has a large number of consonant phonemes, most of
which are represented by digraphs, trigraphs, or more. The presence of
various consonantal phonemes causes the one vowel to take on a large
number of phonetic realisations.

For example, the words "bat, bet, bit, bot, but" all end in /t/ but
the they have different initial consonants, which I will represent as
/ba/, /be/, /bi/, /bo/, /bu/ and which condition a different phonetic
realisation of the vowel between the initial and final consonant.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>