Re: Romanized Orthography of My Conlang

Nik Taylor wrote:

> Well, for one thing, [h] and [N] are not in complementary distribution -
> both can occur in intervocalic position, e.g. "reheat" (/rihit/) and
> "singing" (/siNiN/).
Oh, surely "reheat" is /ri$hit/ and "singing" is /siN$iN/ where $ is
syllable division, no?

[...]

> I disagree.  Determining phonemes must be taken synchronically.
> Language exists only in the brains of the speakers, and the speakers
> don't know anything about history when they're learning it.
All right.  I guess I didn't know why Mr. Grandsire felt compelled to
make a decision one way or another as to whether those two sounds were
allophones or not, since he already knew all the interesting *facts*
of the matter, those being (a) "The phones are in complementary
distribution," (b) "they are phonetically similar," and (c) "speakers
of the language perceive them as different sounds."

Saying that they are, or are not, different phonemes doesn't seem to
me to add any factual information; it's merely a matter of choice of
terminology.

So I thought that history might be a good thing to bring in to break
the "tie" so to speak of facts (a) and (b) suggesting they are
allophones and (c) suggesting they are not.  It's artificial, but the
whole thing was, in my understanding, artificial.

But perhaps you know better: given facts (a) (b) and (c), are they
allophones or not, and why?

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             edheil@postmark.net
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