Re: phonology of Plan B

Hallo!

On Mon, 9 Jul 2007 08:03:22 +0100, R A Brown wrote:

[snip]

> 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}
Yes.  As clear as it can be.

> > 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.
Yes.  At least it doesn't speak of "vocalic and consonantal allophones".
The term 'phoneme' is not used at all, he rather talks about
pronunciations of letters, like a 19th-century grammarian.

> 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"   :)
Yes, I understand it the same way.

> 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).
Sure.  The Plan B *phonology* - once one gets away from the strange
analysis with vocalic and consonantal "allophones" that Jacques proposed
in joke and And in earnest - is not at all bizarre (it is of course
derivative of American English, especially in the vowels, but that's
a different matter entirely).  The *orthography* is the weird stuff,
by using each of 16 graphemes for two phonemes.

> 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.
Yes, that would have been more sane and elegant.  But then, he would
have run out of letters, at least as long as he restricted himself
to the 26 letters of the standard Latin alphabet ...

[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."
Which I guessed that you meant it, anyway.

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