Re: phonology of Plan B

Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Hallo!
>
> On Sun, 8 Jul 2007 15:23:43 +0100, R A Brown wrote:
[snip]
>>In the words John McEnroe (with similar intonation & gestures): "You can
>>not be serious!"
>
>
> I hope you didn't smash your racket - those things are expensive :)
It's just the intonation & gestures that were similar. My study is not
much like a tennis court, and the racket was only a virtual one   :)

[snip]
>
>>So where does the notion that Plan B has 16 phonemes come from? To the
>>best of my knowledge it is due to Jacques Guy's satirical 'Plan C' in
>>which he wrote:
[snip]
>
> Absolutely.  Jacques Guy pulled a joke from the baroque dual-value
> spelling system of Plan B, nothing else!
Jacques Guy made it quite clear he was pulling a joke:
{quote}
I want to tell about Plan B "Design and Implementation of a Near-Optimal
Loglan Syntax". Be warned: I'm about to take the mickey out of Plan B ..
{\quote}

> But And did not notice
> the humour and based his analysis on it :)
Possibly. But it occurred to me also that my webpage dealing with this
was also misleading. It suggested that Jeff Prothero considered the
sixteen symbols to be phonemes. As I wrote in my last mail, *he made no
such claim* - indeed, any sane reading of his article must surely
conclude that Jeff was thinking in terms of sixteen consonants _and_
sixteen vowels/vowel combos.

Jacques was, as you say, pulling a joke from the bizarre dual-value
spelling system; he was rather mischievous, methinks, in writing "The
Plan-B language....has 16 er... phonemes, because sixteen is a power of
two, which makes it computationally desirable. Each phoneme has two
allophones, one of which is a vowel, or a diphthong, or the same
preceded by 'r', the other a consonant. I say: jolly good idea!"

Of course, it is perfectly clear from Jacques article that he means
"It's a damn stupid idea"   :)

As you rightly observe, it's the _spelling_ Jacques is making fun off.
It's Plan B's *orthography* that is weird, not it's phonology. The
language is written is written with sixteen *graphemes*, and - as indeed
Jeff Prothero makes clear - each grapheme may be "used as a consonant"
or "used as a vowel" (quotes are from JP).

Instead of mapping each grapheme to two different & unrelated sounds, he
could have mapped each bit quartet(half-byte, "nibble") to two different
graphemes: one denoting a consonant the other a vowel/vowel combo.

[snip]
>>Of course a strict CV language would achieve the same result, i.e.
>>allowing a bitstream to be mapped to a sequence of consonant + vowel.
>>Jeff Prothero could easily have given his 16 bit patters a simple
>>syllabic value. Yes, a language with only 16 CV syllables is a bit low
>>on vowels and consonants. But in my email of Monday, 19th Sept. 2005, i
>>showed have the 16 bits could easily be mapped to a system of 24
>>syllables; in my page
>>http://www.carolandray.plus.com/Loglang/PhonAndOrthog.html
>>I give an alternative system.
>
>
> Yes.  See also http://wiki.frath.net/X-1 for a similar system
> (both system fell out of the same discussion, so the similarity
> is not coincidential).  (I have just reformulated the phonology
> section a bit.  It was speaking of "16 literals ('phonemes')",
> but the 16 literals are of course not phonemes.  X-1 has 11 phonemes,
> namely the 7 consonants /p t k s m n l/ and the 4 vowels /i E O u/.)

Yes - it occurred to me that my page (URL given above) was unfair on
Jeff Prothero and rather misleading in that it appeared to take Jacques'
"er... phonemes" seriously. I have now amended it, since writing my
previous mail. I may well make a few further amendments.
[snip
>>How so, you ask? If 32 is too many, surely 256 is way over the top! But
>>consider De Kolovrat's system of mapping the 100 decimal numerals from
>>00 through to 99 into pronounceable CV syllables. One could fairly
>>easily create a similar system for mapping the hex values 00 through to
>>FF into pronounceable CV syllables; this even byte value would map into
>>a unique CV syllable.
OOPS! That should have read: "thus every byte value would map into a
unique CV syllable."

Keep watching for this one   :)


--
Ray
==================================
ray@carolandray.plus.com
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
Nid rhy hen neb i ddysgu.
There's none too old to learn.
[WELSH PROVERB]