Re: phonology of Plan B

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.

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