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Re: phonology of Plan B

From:Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
Date:Saturday, July 7, 2007, 18:46
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. ... brought to you by the Weeping Elf