The Ambiguity of "Noise" [WAS: Parallelism]

Apologies if you already took this point into consideration, but here goes:

"noise" has more than one meaning in language studies.

In information theory, it refers to a frequent concomitant to a signal that
conveys no information, or something like that.

In phonetics and acoustics, however, it refers to aperiodic sound produced
by turbulance at some constriction of the vocal tract.

Most consonants are noisy in the phonetic/acoustic sense.    Since noise can
be spread over different ranges of frequencies, different noises can be
discriminated and can carry information.

Frankly, it's simply inaccurate to allege that the proponants of the
existence of phonemes equate the tonal or periodic componants of sounds with
the part of the sound that carries the information.   I have had a number of
academics tell me that the consonants carry most of the information, and all
of these academics believed in phonemes.

Are we tripping over the multiple meanings of the word "noise"?

Jim


>> That doesn't mean that phonemes don't exist!  As you pointed out,
>> there are three fairly pure tones.  Those are the defining
>> characteristics of the word.  However, they're quite brief,
>> especially stops, far too brief to perceive, so humans use that
>> noise to figure out what the sounds are.  [b] [a] [d] do exist,
>> but we infer the consonants that from the "noise" surrounding the
>> vowel.
>
>If I can identify a word by listening to X, but not by listening to
>Y, it seems perverse to insist that Y is signal and X is noise.
>
>But you seem to have firm opinions on this, and all I have is a
>half-remembered anecdote, so I am not prepared to argue it.