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Re: phonology of Plan B

From:Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
Date:Wednesday, July 11, 2007, 15:13
Hallo!

On Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:08:13 +0100, And Rosta wrote:

> R A Brown, On 08/07/2007 15:23:
[...]
> > What??? > > I suspect we are working with crucially different assumptions about Plan B > (mine perhaps incorrect), so let me clarify this first. If after this we > still disagree, then I'll reply to your lengthy messages in detail. ;) > > The crucial assumption I was making is that a morpheme can begin with > a consonantal or vocalic allophone, depending on which sort of allophone > the previous morpheme ends with.
Unfortunately, the page on Plan B is not clear about this, but my impression is indeed like yours, that a morpheme can begin with a consonant or a vowel, depending on whether the length of the preceding morphemes in the utterance is even or odd. In that case, it is reasonable to assume that [SoUboUt] and [EIZEZru:] are realizations of the same morpheme (the |cjbjt| from Jeff's original example), but rather than saying they consist of the same phonemes, I'd rather say that they are allomorphs of the same morpheme, or something like that. Actually, I don't think a system like Plan B can be really meaningfully analysed in terms that were developed for *natlangs*, bacause its structure is fundamentally different, and the spoken form is a derivation of the written form (while in written natlangs, it goes just the other way), which is in essence a derivation of a stream of bits (which is a kind of manifestation natlangs did not have at all before the telegraph and later the computer were invented). I think the root of the present disagreement lies in disagreeing on *what* in the language, at which layer, is a 'phoneme'. And calls the letters/bit quartets 'phonemes', while Ray calls the spoken realizations of those units 'phonemes'. That is a matter of definition. A point for And is that what he calls 'phonemes' are in fact the fundamental building blocks of Plan B, as phonemes are in human natural languages. A point for Ray is that he applies the term to phenomena that occur on the *spoken* level. The term 'phoneme' simply breaks down here, because *the spoken layer is not fundamental*.
> So suppose the language ('Pentaphon') has 5 phonemes: > > /1/ [g, i] > /2/ [h, e] > /3/ [d, a] > /4/ [f, o] > /5/ [b, u] > > -- Then a morpheme /123/ can be [ged] or [iha]. It's because of these > systematic equivalences that I think the 5-phoneme analysis is correct.
Or rather, an analysis that assumes 5 fundamental units is meaningful; whether it is a good idea to call these units 'phonemes' is a different question. I think it is not, because these units exist on a layer more fundamental than what most linguists would assume to be the phonemic layer.
> If, on the other hand, morphemes in the language ('Bogstandard') were > made up of strings of CV syllables, composed of one of 5 onsets and one > of 5 nuclei, I would not defend a 5-phoneme analysis.
Agreed.
> So, if Plan B is like Pentaphon, then I insist I'm right and you're wrong. > But if Plan B is like Bogstandard, then I withdraw my previous remarks > about Plan B, and acknowledge the correctness of what you and Joerg had > said about it.
If Plan B is like Pentaphon, And's analysis makes sense, but I would not use the term 'phoneme' for the 16 fundamental units of the language. If Plan B is like Bogstandard, the 16 letters / bit quartets are not 'phonemes' in any meaningful sense of the word. On Wed, 11 Jul 2007 09:24:03 +0100, R A Brown wrote:
> I asked 'what' because I did not understand what you meant. I see from > below you are referring to a peculiar feature of Plan B's _morphology_. > > Part of the problem is, I think, exactly what we mean by 'phoneme'. I > was using it to mean "The minimal unit in the sound system of a > language, according to traditional phonological theories" [Crystal]. I > thought it was clear that I have consistently been talking strictly in > terms of phonology. This seems to be the case with Jörg also.
Yes. I feel more comfortable applying the term 'phoneme' to *sound units* than to letters, bit patterns or other inaudible representations of a language, even if the latter turn out to be more fundamental to the language than the spoken sounds.
> I know that there are different definitions of 'phoneme' given by > differing schools of linguists. But the variant allophones of a phoneme > are IME normally considered to similar in some manner or other.
Indeed. Otherwise, English _hang_ could be considered a phonemic palindrome, because [h] occurs only in onsets and [N] only in codas, and are henceforth in complementary distribution. There are no minimal pairs for them. Yet, any sane phonologist would say that /h/ and /N/ are distinct phonemes because they have no common features.
> > > > I suspect we are working with crucially different assumptions about Plan > > B (mine perhaps incorrect), so let me clarify this first. If after this > > we still disagree, then I'll reply to your lengthy messages in detail. ;) > > > > The crucial assumption I was making is that a morpheme can begin with a > > consonantal or vocalic allophone, depending on which sort of allophone > > the previous morpheme ends with. > > This is true.
This is my impression of Plan B, too.
> > So suppose the language ('Pentaphon') has 5 phonemes: > > > > /1/ [g, i] > > /2/ [h, e] > > /3/ [d, a] > > /4/ [f, o] > > /5/ [b, u] > > While I imagine a language in which [b] and [u] might be variants of the > same phoneme, I find it difficult to see what [d] and [a] have in > common, still less what [ej] and [S] has in common on Plan B.
Concurred.
> Listing the morphemes as /1/, /2/, /3/ etc looks to me just a fudge. > Normally (always?) when morphemes are given between slashes the > character is a phonetic one that _broadly_ denotes the range of sounds > the phoneme has in a particular language. > > > -- Then a morpheme /123/ can be [ged] or [iha]. It's because of these > > systematic equivalences that I think the 5-phoneme analysis is correct. > > We are here, surely, dealing with a _morphophonemic_ level of analysis. > Morphophonemes are normally symbolized with upper case letters as, e.g. > English {najF} which some posit as the morphophoneme of English _knife ~ > knives_. > > Yes, in Pentaphone one could consider that the morphophoneme {123} may > be be realized as [ged] or [iha].
This is indeed a valid analysis.
> > If, on the other hand, morphemes in the language ('Bogstandard') were > > made up of strings of CV syllables, composed of one of 5 onsets and one > > of 5 nuclei, I would not defend a 5-phoneme analysis. > > Notwithstanding your correct analysis of Plan B, it is still true that > the morphemes of Plan B do consist of strings of syllables. One can > quite easily derive a BNF representation showing the generation of valid > strings in Plan B.
Yes.
> > So, if Plan B is like Pentaphon, then I insist I'm right and you're > > wrong. > > As I say, it depends how one defines 'phoneme'. Jeff Prothero does not > use the term in his description of his language. It is also clear to me > that he was not particularly interested in how it was pronounced, but > simply a gave a ad_hoc scheme whereby a string of four-bit groups could > be given a human pronounceable sound, without bothering what this might > imply for phonological or morphophonemic analysis.
Yes. As I have said before, Plan B is fundamentally not a language of spoken sounds, but of bit patterns, and the pronunciation rules are as peripheral to the language's structure as the ASCII encoding is to the structure of English.
> But IMO treating > > /1/ [g, i] > > /2/ [h, e] > > /3/ [d, a] > > /4/ [f, o] > > /5/ [b, u] > > ... as five _phonemes_ merits the satire of Jacques Guy's "Plan C."
True. "/1/" to "/5/" may be fundamental units of some sort, but 'phoneme' simply is not the right word for them. On Wed, 11 Jul 2007 04:54:49 -0400, Alex Fink wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Jul 2007 09:24:03 +0100, R A Brown <ray@...>
wrote:
> > >And Rosta wrote: > >> So suppose the language ('Pentaphon') has 5 phonemes: > >> > >> /1/ [g, i] > >> /2/ [h, e] > >> /3/ [d, a] > >> /4/ [f, o] > >> /5/ [b, u] > [...] > >> -- Then a morpheme /123/ can be [ged] or [iha]. It's because of these > >> systematic equivalences that I think the 5-phoneme analysis is correct. > > This is what I always assumed was going on with Plan B, though probably > through the influence of my own dabblings with binary conlangs of vaguely > similar flavour. These had words of completely variable length, not > necessarily even whole numbers of hex digits. But when it came time to > assign ways of reading bitstrings, my first couple attempts took the lazy > approach of just giving each n-bit string a pronunciation for some constant > n, in the first case n=7. So each word had seven allomorphs, completely > phonetically unrelated and whose selectional criteria didn't depend on the > local phonetics but rather on the number of bits mod 7 preceding the word in > the utterance The sandhi at word boundaries was frightful from a phonetic > point of view as well. I'm sure this sort of thing would be completely > impossible to learn to do in real time in a human-spoken language. I'm not > so sure about the alternations my and And's interpretation of Plan B > displays, but at the very least they wouldn't survive for long in the wild.
This must have been a monstrosity! My impression of Plan B was similar. Any morpheme could start at an even or an odd position, giving two possible pronunciations of each morpheme.
> Anyhow, on a closer reading of Prothero's essay, it does seem to be > unspecified whether Plan B exhibits this behaviour, probably as a > consequence of the inconsequentality of how the phonetic realization is > done.
Yes. [snip]
> What would you say, then, to the perspective that Pentaphon (and by > extension And's Plan B)
Plan B is by Jeff Prothero, not And Rosta. Just for the record.
> has as its inventory five (sixteen) morphophones, > and that the phonemic level must be taken as secondary? The alternations > are sufficiently unnaturalistic that Crystal's definition of phoneme just > breaks down, IMO.
This makes sense. One should, however, avoid the term 'phoneme'. The conventional definition of a phoneme indeed breaks down here, as it implies that a phoneme is both a *spoken* unit and a *fundamental* unit - and in Plan B, the fundamental units are *not* spoken.
> An example in a similar spirit dropped on the ZBB a week or so back. How > would you phonemically analyse spoken Solresol, in which the segmental > content of all utterances matches the regular expression > ((do)|(re)|(mi)|(fa)|(sol)|(la)|(si))* ? Seven morphophones or ten > phonemes, or something else?
Hard to say. ... brought to you by the Weeping Elf