Re: Romanized Orthography of My Conlang

Ed Heil wrote:
> Oh, surely "reheat" is /ri$hit/ and "singing" is /siN$iN/ where $ is
> syllable division, no?
Perhaps, but it seems rather artificial to say draw syllable-boundaries
that way.  The only way I know of to indicate objectively
syllable-boundaries is that English vowels are short before
syllable-final voiceless obstruents (/sit/ vs. /si:/ or /si:d/)

> given facts (a) (b) and (c), are they allophones or not, and why?
Well, I'd consider them allophones, assuming that they are truly in
complementary distribution, for the same reason that I consider [@] and
[V] to be seperate phonemes, despite the fact that they seem different
and are diachronically different.  [@] comes from reduction of other
vowels, while [V] comes from, if I'm not mistaken, [u] or perhaps [U] in
certain contexts.  That is, phones are allophones if they are
phonetically similar AND in complementary distribution.

But, then again, if phonemes exist in the brain, then the perception of
*monolingual* speakers (thus excluding those who perceive a difference
because they have learned a language that uses that difference
phonemically) that they are different indicate that they are stored as
separate entities in the brain?  That would make some sense in the case
of [@]/[V], perhaps [@] isn't even stored as a phoneme, but merely as a
rule that vowels become that in certain contexts, so that "democracy" is
stored as /dImAkr&si/?  But, this seems rather artificial ...

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