Re: phonology of Plan B
| From: | Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Thursday, July 12, 2007, 20:01 |
|---|
Hallo!
On Thu, 12 Jul 2007 10:32:30 +0100, R A Brown wrote:
> And Rosta wrote:
> > What an interesting thread!
[...]
> > I don't agree that it is *morphology*. But more below.
>
> What I meant is that if we found a language in which, for what ever
> reason, a fieldworker had given the strange orthography for the language
> I dubbed 'Rotakas C' in an earlier mail, I think both you and I would
> wonder what he was up to. It is only - and I am speaking in terms of the
> *surface level* - because there is a _consistent_, and not random,
> contrast in the phones of the morphs that we realize there is, for
> example, a consistent pairing of [raj] and [s] in the surface phonology
> of Plan B as given by Jeff Prothero in his article of 9th May, 1990.
>
> If we did not know the underlying structure and had only the spelling
> system given us, we would consider a system in which |s| is sometimes
> pronounced [s] and sometimes pronounced [raj] to be weird. It is only
> when we notice that this alternation is consistent and not random that
> we would realize that there was something underlying this pairing.
And this something is *not* a "phoneme". In Greek (correct me if
I am wrong, Ray) the accusative singular ending has two forms, namely
-n and -a. Nevertheless, /n/ and /a/ are *completely different phonemes*.
It is just that this particular morpheme has two completely different
*allomorphs* (diachronically, of course, they are connected, both
descending from PIE *-m by regular sound changes).
> Now, of course, it is extremely unlikely that anything like the behavior
> of Plan B would occur in a natlang, but if it did we would notice it not
> be purely phonetic criteria but through its morphology also.
>
> In the case of Plan B, we know the underlying structure which accounts
> for this strange behavior at surface level.
In which point there is probably an agreement between all of us.
The only disagreement lies in that And wants to call the elements of
the underlying structure "phonemes" even though they are bit quartets
and not domains in the human phonetic space, which Ray and I consider
misuse of terminology.
> [snip]
> >
> > Well, as you say, there are different definitions & overlapping
> > traditions and so forth. I think (a) that the phonetic similarity of
> > allophones is merely typical of natural languages, and not criterial in
> > establishing phonemicity & allophony; and (b) that (a) is consistent
> > with mainstream views in the discipline.
>
> Um - I think I would along with all of that except I have reservations
> about "not criterial in establishing phonemicity & allophony." It has
> often been pointed out that [h] and [N] are in complementary
> distribution in English and some have from time to time claimed that the
> two sounds are allophones of the same phoneme. The reason why this
> generally rejected is that the ordinary 'person in the street' does not
> feel them to be the same sound, i.e. there is no phonetic similarity
> between the two.
Exactly. Ask a native speaker of English to pronounce the word _hang_
backwards, and he'll certainly *not* say [h&N]! This word certainly
is not a phonemic palindrome! Even if the "person in the street"
doesn't know what a phoneme is, he will not consider [h] and [N] to be
"the same sound". This only to show that when one allows non-contiguous
"phonemes", a dam breaks and everything becomes meaningless. Of course,
the connection between, e.g. Plan B [ej] and [S] is more real than that
between English [h] and [N], but that *doesn't mean that they are the
same phoneme*. I still feel uneasy at calling a bit quartet a "phoneme",
though I have to admit that And's usage of this term is not *entirely*
unjustified, as the bit quartets play a similar role in Plan B as the
phonemes in a natural language, and thus fulfill one particular aspect
of "phonemeness".
> The very word 'PHONeme' should IMO essentially refer to _sound_.
Right.
> > (b) is, of course, not to say that you would be wrong to insist that I
> > am wrong on (a). But, firstly, I think that you might now on reflection
> > find the 16-phoneme analysis of Plan B less risible.
>
> I still hold that it is risible to analyze Plan B as having 16 phonemes.
I wouldn't say "risible"; I'd rather say "misleading". And's analysis
is not entirely ludicrous; it's just that the term "phoneme" is poorly
chosen. In *one single aspect*, namely the role of fundamental building
blocks of the language, the 16 bit quartets *are* "phonemes", but that
only shows that Plan B is not a naturalistic language and that
naturalistic analysis breaks down here.
> What I concede is wrong is to be risible about Jeff Prothero in this
> regard. He never asserted that his language has sixteen phonemes. In my
> view Jacques Guy was being a little mischievous refer to "...er sixteen
> phonemes."
Yes. He was.
> It is clear that how the language is actually spoken was very much a
> secondary consideration for Jeff. He wrote:
> {quote}
> The proposed syntax consists of:
> * An alphabet. "bcdf ghjk lmnp stvz" is suggested, but the
> choice is not critical.
> * A pronunciation scheme which makes all sequences of
> letters equally pronouncable, thus decoupling the rest
> of the language design from the details of the human
> vocal tract.
> {\quote}
>
> If you look at
>
http://www.carolandray.plus.com/Loglang/PhonAndOrthog.html
>
> you will see that:
> * I have given Plan B an alphabet of "w y g k r l z s n ñ d t µ m b p" -
> Jeff clearly states "the choice is not critical."
> * I have given that 'alphabet' a "scheme which makes all sequences of
> letters equally pronounceable."
>
> I put 'alphabet' between quotes because, strictly speaking, it is now a
> syllabary. But what I have done is, I submit, merely another valid
> implementation of what Jeff states in his article. But my version does
> not lead to:
> (a) the creation of pairs of phonetically unrelated morphemes;
> (b) does not produce an orthography in which each grapheme has a pair of
> unrelated pronunciations.
>
> Thus, it would seem to me, that (a) and (b) are not essential features
> of Plan B; they are the accidental features of a particular (and IMO
> rather ad_hoc) implementation. A different implementation would have
> given very different results.
> The underlying units of Plan B are the quartets of bits, and these have,
> in themselves, nothing whatever to do with phonology. As I have shown,
> they could be mapped into phones in quite different ways. To talk of the
> quartets as "phonemes" is IMO wrong and misleading.
It is indeed misleading.
> > Secondly, phonological theories that do treat phonetic similarity as
> > criterial for allophony would tend to be 'cognitivist' (rather than
> > 'abstractionist') and very much focused on the phonology of natural
> > language.
>
> Yes - agreed.
>
> > Such theories would be very unsuited to intrinsically
> > unnatural engelangs like Plan B. Thus, Plan B, by its nature, needs to
> > be analysed in terms of an abstractionist model without a bias to natlangs
>
> Plan B certainly needs some different analysis from natlangs.
Certainly, because it doesn't work like a natlang; it differs from the
latter especially in that its basic meaning-distinguishing units are
not domains in the human phonetic space, but bit patterns.
> But, as I
> have shown, the surface spoken form could be realized quite differently
> and yet still adhere to the criteria Jeff laid down for his language.
> Therefore, one must ask how meaningful it is to discuss the _phonology_
> of Plan B. Can, indeed, Plan B be said to have a phonology? At best we
> can discuss the phonology of the particular mapping of quartets to sound
> given by Jeff in his article of 9th May, 1990. But, as Jeff also wrote"
>
> "the particular letters and pronunciations chosen don't matter much."
>
> This being so, how meaningful is it to talk of the phonemic inventory of
> Plan B?
Not very meaningful, indeed, rather meaningless. It is about as
meaningful as discussing the "bit pattern inventory of English" (which
depends on the *encoding* used, be it ASCII, EBCDIC, ITA or whatever).
> [snip]
> >>
> >> 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.
> >
> >
> > Let's agree for the sake of argument that the (putative) allophones are
> > phonetically dissimilar.
>
> Sorry - I cannot agree that allophones will be as phonetically
> dissimilar as [ej} ~ [S], or [a} and [d], any more than I would expect
> [N] ~ [h]. If I find pairings of such dissimilar sounds, I would suspect
> suspect that something other than phonemic allophony was going on.
So would I.
> [snip]
> >
> > Again I'd argue that tenability of using a broad phonetic representation
> > as a phonological representation is an accident of natural language.
> > (--Because there is scant chance for phonetically dissimilar allophony
> > to come into being and get learnt by children.)
>
> You mean, er, sort of because it doesn't exist :)
Probably ...
[...]
> I can quite understand that by applying systematic phonemics to Plan B
> you will probably arrive at a 16-phoneme analysis. As I said in my
> previous mail, I suspect that that is your approach.
Apparently. And I wouldn't call it "risible"; it's just that this
is an extension of the term "phoneme" well beyond the conventional
meaning.
> My approach has always been from the surface level of the actual
> pronunciation of Plan B; and at that level, yes, I do hold that an
> analysis of 16-phonemes is risible.
>
> You hold that my approach is inappropriate for Plan B because it is an
> engelang. I do not think that being an engelang per_se makes it
> inappropriate, but I do now agree that it is inappropriate for the
> reason I shall give below.
>
> I hold that to apply systematic phonemics to Plan B is inappropriate
> because strictly Plan B has no standard spoken form - "the particular
> letters and pronunciations chosen don't matter much." I have shown that
> Plan B could be very simply be implemented in a system whereby each
> quartet has only _one_ phonetic realization and, therefore, the
> morphemes also have only one phonetic realization.
>
> Therefore, I now conclude that _both_ my analysis of Plan B as having 16
> consonant phonemes, eight vowel phonemes, and the 'glide' /r/ is
> mistaken, _and_ you analysis of 16-phonemes is equally mistaken. IMO we
> are both analyzing a chimera ;)
Yes. And that's why this whole thread is running in circles, with
the same arguments being exchanged over and over again. We should
agree that Plan B is fundamentally a language of bit quartets, and
that any phonological analysis of it (in the traditional meaning of
the term "phonology", of course) depends on arbitrary secondary
factors and is thus *meaningless*.
> [snip]
>
> >> 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.
> >
> > I quite agree. And therein lies a prime example of the theoretical
> > interest of engelangs.
>
> I agree entirely on that point.
>
> I think the differences between you & me over the "phonemic" analysis of
> Plan B, show how applying natlang criteria to an engelang is not always
> appropriate.
Exactly.
> The basic units of Plan B are the quartets of bits. One can discuss
> whether the ad_hoc system of mapping the bits to writing and to spoken
> sound is a sensible one or not, but to discuss the phonology of Plan B
> does not make much sense because, in the strict sense, it has no phonology.
Yes. Plan B has no phonology. It *can* be represented by vowels
and consonants, the same way natural languages can be encoded in bit
streams, but the same way there are many different ways of encoding
a particular natural language in a bit stream, there are many different
ways of encoding Plan B in human speech sounds. Hence, it does not
have a phonology in the strict sense of the word.
> >
> > OK, so to summarize:
> >
> > One can take either a concretist or an abstractist view of phonology,
> > according to the degree to which phonology has or lacks phonetic
> > substance (and, by extension, whether phonemes are phonetic
> > generalizations over allophones).
> >
> > You are a concretist, and think abstractism deserves satire.
>
> Not per_se - it depends what abstractionism comes up with. The arguments
> between concretism & abstractionism are ancient. In the west the go back
> at least to the Greeks of the 6th century BC. But when abstractionists
> come up with theories that give a world picture (e.g. motion doesn't
> exist) so at variance with common experience, then a bit of satire does
> not come amiss.
Right. Some abstractions are useful, others are not. And using
a terminology that suggests a concreteness where is none is simply
misleading.
> An abstractionism that leads to the positing of [raj] and [s] as
> allophones of the same phoneme does seem to me worthy of satire. Surely,
> if such a position is posited it should signal that perhaps a more
> meaningful approach should be taken. i.e. let us find out how such a
> weird pairing came about.
>
> I now maintain that Plan B, in its strictest sense, has no phonology and
> that therefore it is not meaningful to analyze its phonology. What is
> meaningful to discuss are the pros and cons of different ways of mapping
> the fundamental quartets to a human-usable form.
Concurred.
> >
> > I am an abstractist at heart. Both abstractism and concretism have a lot
> > going for them as ways of modelling natural language in human minds. But
> > for an unnaturalistic engelang, only an abstractist analysis makes sense.
>
> Probably depends to some extent on the engelang. it should, however, be
> analyzed in terms of its structure, which is why I say that a
> phonological analysis of Plan B is not appropriate.
Yes. Engelangs often have structures that in some ways superficially
resemble those of natural languages, but are actually something entirely
different, and ignoring this fundamental difference leads to an analysis
that is skewed and meaningless. I remember a thread about the syntax
of Fith (a stack-based language) two years ago, in which someone described
the syntax of said language as "SOV" and "postpositional". My comment
on that analysis was the following:
[quote]
A stack-based language is not only "not exactly" an "SOV,
postpositional,
noun-adj language", it is *not at all*. It lies wholly outside the
range of human language structures. A simple clause in a stack-based
language may perhaps look like one in an SOV, postpositional, noun-adj
language (as a simple clause in Fith indeed looks like), but that
resemblance is merely superficial, because the clause is parsed in an
utterly different way from *any* human language.
[/quote]
We are at something similar with Plan B's phonology. A phonological
analysis of Plan B is about as meaningless as a classification of Fith
along traditional word order typology based on the outward appearance
of a simple clause.
> A phonological
> examination might be made when comparing different mappings of the its
> quartets to spoken form for human use, but that IMO is another matter.
Yes.
> -----------------------------
>
> Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> > Hallo!
> >
> > On Wed, 11 Jul 2007 17:58:30 +0100, R A Brown wrote in reply to Alex
> Fink:
>
> [snip]
> >>Yes, I don't think either I or And or Jörg disagree that that is
> >>essentially what is going on. The difference is on the _interpretation_
> >>of what is happening.
> >
> > Yes. The question is not whether there is something that can manifest
> > either as [d] or as [a] (or whatever pair of consonant and vowel);
> > the question is whether this something ought to be called a 'phoneme'.
> > In my opinion, not, because it is *not a contiguous domain in the human
> > phonetic space*. Actually, it is not something pronuncible or audible
> > at all - it is a *bit quartet* that is mapped onto *two distinct
> phonemes*,
> > depending on whether its position number in the utterance is even or odd.
>
> Exactly:
> - [d] and [a] are "not a contiguous domain in the human phonetic space'
> and, therefore, an analyst who pairs the two as a *single phoneme*
> should ask if the analysis being used is an appropriate one.
Amen.
> In the case
> of Plan B, it is not, because:
> - it is not something pronounceable or audible at all - it is a *bit
> quartet.*
Yes. And these bit quartets may play the same role phonemes play
in natlangs; nevertheless I feel unconfortable at calling them phonemes.
They simply, as I worded it, "don't live in the human phonetic space".
[...]
> >>But that is the point, isn't it? The allomorphs are completely
> >>phonetically unrelated.
> >
> > They are indeed. There is nothing that /Soubout/ and /eiZeZru:/
> > have in common, except that they are reflexes of the same bit pattern.
> > But bit patterns fall outside the scope of phonology entirely.
>
> They do indeed. Also as I have shown, Plan B could have been implemented
> in such a way that they were no phonetically unrelated allomorphs.
Yes. There is no "phonology of Plan B", as there is not "the bit stream
representation of English"; there are only phonologies of particular
spoken representations of Plan B. Your system has a different phonology
than Jeff's, and mine (X-1) yet another one.
> [snip]
> >>The concept "phoneme" is an abstraction and not all linguists accept the
> >>phonemic theory or phonemic analysis. But it generally works well enough
> >>for the familiar European languages and we use it as a matter of
> >>convenience on this list and most of the time we more or less understand
> >>what each other means. I think the phoneme concept is a useful tool for
> >>the phonological analysis of very many languages.
> >
> >
> > Yes. It works well with most natlangs, and also with naturalistic
> > conlangs that work like natlangs. But even with such languages, things
> > are not always simple, as the controversy about the vowel systems of
> > Northwest Caucasian languages illustrates. At any rate, phonology has
> > progressed beyond linear segmental phonology; not all theories proposed
> > are equally useful, but some phenomena (such as tones and vowel harmony)
> > can be very conveniently treated with non-linear models such as
> > autosegmental phonology.
>
> Exactly. As an unashamed empiricist, I use 'phoneme' as in situations in
> which it is a useful tool; but I will use other tools also when they
> seem appropriate. In the case of a language composed of bit quartets,
> phonemes are not exactly a useful tool ;)
Yes, that's my opinion, too.
> [snip]
> >
> > I am not very fond of generative grammar, either. Some concepts make
> > sense, others do not. I have the feeling that this way of describing
> > language has little to do with how language actually works. Myself,
> > I follow a functionalist approach: language serves a purpose, and thus
> > everything in it has some more or less well-defined function, and form
> > follows function.
>
> Yep - I'm much in agreement with this, tho I suspect And will not be.
> But let's not start another thread on the validity or otherwise of
> generative grammar!
That's a can of wyrms best left unopened.
> [snip]
> >>That's the great thing about Conlangs - you have interesting things like
> >>Solresol & Plan B to keep you thinking :)
> >
> >
> > Yes, these things are interesting. Even to me, who otherwise is more
> > interested in naturalistic conlangs, with sound changes and all that.
> > That, too, is interesting enough; but it is always refreshing to deal
> > with an unnatural engelang - it teaches you not to take *anything*
> > in a language for granted.
>
> Quite so. I think on this point you, I and And will be in complete
> agreement :)
Yes.
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