Re: THEORY: And wrote:

Rob Nierse:
> And wrote:
>
> >It's certainly misleading to describe a language with the basic 5
> >vowels, in long/short, oral/nasal, breathy/creaky/modal versions
> >as having a lot of vowels (viz 5 * 2 * 2 * 3 = 60)
>
> I've been thinking about this since I learned Waorani
> It used to be written as if it was Spanish, so 'I see' was written
> 'abo' and 'I am' was written 'amo'. I had trouble finding out what
> the first person suffix was, -bo or -mo? In the end I realised that
> they were allophones, 'to see' is 'a' and 'to be' is 'a~' and the 'b'
> gets assimilated when preceded by a nasal vowel
>
> In this languages it is misleading *not* to describe the vowels
> in oral and nasal
But the point is whether to treat a-oral and a-nasal as basic
phonological elements, or whether to treat |a| and |nasal| as
basic elements.

> >And similarly
> >for consonants
>
> In Dutch I make a difference between 'pot' and 'bot'
> Do I use different phonemes ('p' vs. 'b') or do I use
> different versions of one sounds, i.e. a bilabial stop?
> I think the first. Or is my thought the result of education?
The question is whether the elements out of which phonological
structures are composed are /b/ and /p/ or (say) |labial-stop|
and |voice|. For a language like Dutch, the latter does not
lead to much simplification level, at least at a superficial
level of analysis. But for a language where the phoneme
inventory is arrived at by crossclassification of many
different attributes (voice, place, manner, airstream, secondary
articulation, etc.) without many gaps in the paradigm, much
simplification is possible if you don't arbitrarily decree that
the basic element of phonological structure is the segment.

--And.