Re: Allophones Question

En réponse à Angel Rivera <mktvr@...>:

>
> I'm readin Pike's _Phonemics_ lately [looks old, but like the only text
> on it my
> library has], and apparently:
>
>     << It is advisable to consider as the norm that segment which has
> the least
> limitation in distribution in the language, and appears to be the least
> affected
> by surrounding sounds.  >>
>
> ...which is why I considered it safe to use the Spanish example.
>
And you would be wrong to do so. After all, what is the distribution of the two
allophones of voiced stops in Castillian Spanish? Simple: voiced fricative in
intervocalic position, and voiced stop *everywhere* else! If you look at
limitation of distribution, the fricative allophone is much more limited in
appearance than the voiced stop. Now because of Spanish's simple syllable
structure, you get often intervocalic consonants. But it doesn't that if you
reason in terms of environment, the voiced stop allophone is freer to appear
than the voiced fricative one.

Moreover, even if this argument you gave was in your favour, it wouldn't be
enough, because this is *not* the main criterion for deciding what a phoneme is
and how to label it. Why? Simply because of the definition of phonemes itself:
phonemes are abstractions manipulated by the mind of the *speakers*! And as
such the main criterion to decide what's phonemic is the speakers' intuition,
and any phonemic analysis that disagrees with the speakers' intuition is
probably flawed. And that is valid for how to label phonemes too. So now let's
look at the Castillian speakers' intuition. Well, if you ask them, they will
tell you that /d/ is indeed a stop, or that they would put /g/ with /k/ rather
than with /x/. That's already a strong sign. Not only that, but if you
pronounce "ciudad" ("city") as [Tju"da] instead of [Tju"Da], the Castillian
speaker will think you have an accent, but won't be able to explain exactly
why, and won't misunderstand you. While if you pronounce [Dar] instead of
[dar], the Castillian speaker will surely interpret this as */Tar/ *"zar" and
thus won't understand you at all (I give this last example because it happened
to me. A slip of the tongue it was), and will ask you to repeat. That's an
extremely strong sign that [d] is considered to be the main sound and [D] is
just unconsciously pronounced between vowels. So calling this phoneme /D/ is
certainly wrong, /d/ is better as it fits with the speakers' intuition (Occam's
razor here. Choose the simplest way to explain all the data).

This is exactly the same reasoning that brings the fact that French has the
phonemes /2/ and /9/ (X-SAMPA for IPA o-slash and oe-ligature) while in the
lexicon they happen to be in complementary distribution. The fact is, the
French people do differentiate them, and although they don't have [9] in open
syllables or [2] in closed ones, they can pronounce them easily if asked to do
so (any French person - except the inhabitants of St-Etienne and around there
who don't have the distinction between mid-low and mid-high vowels at all, and
pronounce them always mid-high - will be able to explain you the difference
between [p2] and [p9] nearly as well as a linguist - they will probably say
it's the same as between [pe] and [pE] -), even if [p9] doesn't exist in the
French lexicon). And if you want to argue that it's an artificial distinction
brought by French education, you'd be wrong, because even if it's true that we
are still taught that /2/ and /9/ are different sounds, we're also taught
that "a" in "patte" is a different from "â" in "pâte", and yet nobody makes the
distinction anymore (the two sounds used to be [a] and [A], but have merged in
a single [a] /a/. I myself still made the distinction 20 years ago, but don't
anymore, and had to relearn it when I learned Dutch) or understand what the
distinction is.

In short, the phoneme behind the group [d], [D] is definitely better be
called /d/ and treated as a stop rather than a fricative in Castillian Spanish,
because that's how Castillian speakers treat it, and we're only trying to
describe their speech.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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