Re: phonology of Plan B

Hallo!

On Sat, 7 Jul 2007 17:45:37 +0100, And Rosta wrote:

> Joerg & Ray concur that Plan B does not have 16 phonemes with consonantal
> and vocalic allophones:
>
> [...]
>
> To my eyes, the most sensible analysis of Plan B is the 16-phoneme
> dual-allophony one. It's the analysis you get if you apply basic principles
> of contrastiveness; and the alternatives that Joerg & Ray put forward fail
> to account for the systematic equivalence of consonants and vowel phonemes.
>
> What is unnatural is Plan B phonology itself, not the 16-phoneme analysis of
> it.
Yes, this objection is not all that unreasonable.  Plan B is an utterly
unnatural language, and any attempt at analysing it as if it was a natural or
naturalistic one will fail to work out properly.  *Underlyingly*, a Plan B
utterance is a *stream of bits* which is segmented into 4-bit units, and it is
these *bit patterns* that are the fundamental building blocks of the language.

The consonants and vowels are as secondary to the language as are the letters
we use to write English secondary to the English language.  Yet, I wouldn't
call the bit patterns "phonemes" because they are not domains in the human
phonetic space.  They exist at another tier, one which simply does not exist
in human natural languages.  The difference between Plan B and natural
languages is that the phonemes are not the fundamental tier, but a secondary
one, as the graphemes are in the written form of a natlang.

So, how to analyse Plan B correctly?  In the analysis of the spoken
representation you get 16 syllable-initial consonants, 8 vowels and
diphthongs, and another consonant /r/ that may or may not be inserted
between the syllable-initial consonant and the vowel.  Ray and I said that
the 16 vowels and r/vowel combos are not allophones of the 16 consonants
because they are completely different sounds.  You say they are.  You are
in some sense right, but the identity exists at a *deeper level*, namely
that of the bit patterns.  [b] and [E] have very little in common except
that they both encode the bit pattern '0000', which doesn't necessarily mean
that they are "the same phoneme", no more than |f| and |ph| are "the same
grapheme" because they represent the same phoneme in English (/f/).

What one can conclude from this is that it is not very meaningful
to analyse Plan B at the tier of spoken sounds - it is fundamentally
a language of bit patterns, not of spoken sounds.

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