Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

phonology of Plan B

From:And Rosta <and.rosta@...>
Date:Saturday, July 7, 2007, 16:45
Joerg & Ray concur that Plan B does not have 16 phonemes with consonantal and vocalic allophones:

Jörg Rhiemeier, On 02/07/2007 21:08:
> On Mon, 2 Jul 2007 17:01:25 +0100, R A Brown wrote: >> Jörg Rhiemeier wrote: >> [Plan B etc] >>> On Mon, 2 Jul 2007 07:27:29 +0100, R A Brown wrote: >> [snip] >>>> The language *simply is not spelled phonemically* >>> >>> It can indeed be argued that Plan B has 16 consonant phonemes and >>> 16 vowel phonemes with a rule that forbids both consonant clusters >>> and vowel clusters; >> It most certainly has 16 consonant phonemes. Whether it has 8 or 16 >> vowel phonemes is a matter of interpretation. If phonemic status is >> given to /r/, then we have 8 vowel phonemes plus 8 combos of /r/ plus a >> vowel. The rule is then that syllables must be of the form: C(r)V(C) > > I did not remember that the "16 vowels" included 8 /r/+vowel combos. > I'd say that /r/ is a phoneme, so there are 17 consonants, one of them > being /r/ that patterns fundamentally different than the other 16, and > 8 vowels. > >>> this is probably a better analysis than saying >>> it had 16 phonemes each with a consonantal and a vocalic allophone. >> That IMHO is a simply a ridiculous analysis! > > Concurred. It is very far-fetched, and if someone was to analyse > a natlang that way, he should ask himself what he is doing. It is > like saying that English had a phoneme that is realized as [h] in > syllable onsets and as [N] in codas - only worse (surely, the > English word _hang_ is not a phonemic palindrome!).
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. --And.

Reply

R A Brown <ray@...>