Re: Linguistic Terminology

At 12:04 PM -0400 12/30/98, Sheets, Jeff wrote:
>I'd like a plain english definition of the following terms:
>
>phone
A speech sound (fully specified for every feature possible in human
language). A properly trained phonetician can trasncribe phones without
knowing anything of the langauge in question, but will usually represent
far more detail than actaully matters for understanding the language, hence
the notion of the:
>phoneme
A phoneme represent a speech sound that is distinctive in a particular
language. For instance, the English phoneme /k/ is not specified for
apiration, and can cover a variety of places of articulation from the back
of the velum to the back of the palate, depending on adjacent sounds. A
phoneme represents a class of phones whose distinctions are not significant
in the language (though their occurence and selection may be regular).

People often have trouble hearing phonetic distinctions (between phones)
that are not phonemic (distinctive) in their native langauge.

>allophone
Different phones that may occur for a phoneme. In Japanese, for instance,
/l/ and /r/ are allophones of the same phoneme. This meaningful
distinctions is hard for Japanese learners of English, just as the
Aspirated/Unaspirated distinction is hard for English learners of many
Indian languages.

Sometimes allophones may be shared among several phonemes, creating a
potential ambiguity for some phones.

>morpheme
A morpheme is a minimal distinctive sequence of phonemes. That is to say
it's meaningful, and can't be made any shorter and retain any meaning.
Context matters. For instance the sequence /IN/ (-ing) is a morpheme in
English.

The ending -s in english is an example of "morphonemic variation." it's a
morpheme that can be realized 3 ways (/s/ /z/ /Iz/). The form chosen
depends on the phonological context, and thus what stem it's attached to.
Sometimes "morphophonemes" (morphemes that vary in this way) are
conditioned by specific roots, and not phonology [I'm pretty sure about
this].

>morphology
The rules for word change in a language. Sometimes _processes_ like
stress-shift, vowel length changes, or vowel quality changes are involved.
These get tricky to analyze, some speak of "process morphemes."

Morphology is the set of rules you need to describe to explain how words
change form in a language.

>orthography
The way you write a language. Spelling rules. Often conlangs have
con-scripts, and they are the orthography. Frequently we also have to
devise a roman orthography four our languages (using the Latin-1 character
set commonly used on the WWW, for instance). Sometimes this is a
transliteration (with a 1-1 correspondence to the letters of the
con-script), sometimes it's more precise.

>Also, in relation to these terms, when should I use // and [] to enclose
>sounds?  I think I understand about half of them, but I wanna be sure, and I
>think other people would appreciate the clarity.
// are used for phonemes, and are most common in conlanging. [] are used to
include phones.

These are also sometimes used in more approximate ways to represent
"tighter" and "looser" transcriptions.

Hope this is helpful...

    -- David
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David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
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