--- In cybalist@..., Piotr Gasiorowski <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
wrote:
> Phonemicity (inasmuch as any sort of reality can be ascribed to it)
is a mental phenomenon, and the evidence for phonemic status is
always indirect, since native speakers have no conscious access to
their "analytic engine". A phoneme is a member an abstract system,
contrasting with any other member at least potentially, but not
necessarily. The minimal-pair test may fail occasionally, as in the
case of English /h/, /Z/ = "zh" and /N/ = "ng": as far as I can see,
none of them contrasts with either of the others,...
Ha! Ha! Zsa Zsa.
The name Zsa Zsa, variously spelt, is now quite common in English,
though not as a given name for people. I got a good many hits
on 'Zsazsa' from an internet search.
I tried and failed to invent native-looking English words that would
contrast /Z/ and /N/ medially. Allowing words that look French when
encountered in English didn't help me contrast /Z/ and /N/ finally.
Something strange *is* going on with this pair! (The best pairs I
could come up with were (a) 'pleasure' and '*plenger' and
(b) '*sizzure' and 'singer'. For (a) the root word '*pleng' does not
look right. AFAIK the only short vowel that occurs before /Z&/
is /e/, but the ending /eN/ is not natural in English. There is an
antiquarian word 'dreng', but the form regularly developed from Old
English 'dreng' is 'dring'. '*sizzure' does not feel wrong, but
words do not end 'zzure' in English.)
> ... but no-one in his right mind would argue that they are
allophones of the same phoneme.
Except to prove a point!
/h/ has simple realisation rules :)
(a) Syllable start, except after last stress [h]
(b) Last consonant of intervocalic cluster [h]
(c) Otherwise [N].
(But for the dubious dissection of 'vehicular' into veh + icul + ar,
the real story is:
(i) Morpheme final [N]
(ii) Before consonants, [N]
(iii) Otherwise [h]
These rules better reflect what is happening.)
I am not sure whether Rule (b) is used; I think either the 'h' is
silent or the syllable is stressed so that it will be pronounced. I
think very similar rules apply to Korean, where the allophones are a
glottal stop and [N] :) At least, the rules work for the writing
system!
I have a feeling the above rules might actually apply to a southern
dialect of Thai where initial /N/ has indeed become /h/. I need to
check my secondary source, though.
> The existence of some phonemes is more secure than that of some
others, which is why we use terms like "marginal phonemes", "quasi-
allophonic distribution" or "emerging/disappearing contrasts". In
other words, there is a scale of robustness for putative phonemes,
rather than an infallible "yes or no" algorithm. The analysis of some
items may vary from linguist to linguist (and presumably from one
speaker's unconscious mind to another). I don't know how to answer a
question like "is English /OI/ one phoneme or a tautosyllabic vowel
cluster?" so as to satisfy all my colleagues -- opinions vary and
will probably vary for ever, since competing analyses are possible,
each with its own merits.
What is the issue? Is it a general issue with diphthongs. For
myself, I would not be able to decide which vowel phoneme the '/O/'
belonged to. My idiolect may be of interest. Although I
pronounce 'groin' /groin/ (one syllable), I pronounce 'coin' /coiin/
(two syllables).
> If there is a choice, I tend to side with the splitters rather than
the lumpers as a matter of methodological preference, since
a "splitting" phonemic representation contains more explicit
information. It's easier to lump than to tell apart what has been
lumped (especially if the proposed allophony rules are not very
natural or straightforward), which is why lumping can always wait, as
far as I'm concerned. I also prefer an analysis that is less abstract
and more surface-true to one that uses primarily theoretical
arguments and aims at maximum parsimony in terms of phoneme-counting
but has to complicate the formal machinery in order to derive the
right surface forms. For these reasons I prefer to regard
Sanskrit /t./, /t.H/, /d./, /d.H/ and /n./ as phonemes, while
admitting that their status is far less secure than that of their
dental counterparts and alternative analyses are possible for some of
them, at least in theory.
I don't think there is any doubt about their phonemicity for
Classical Sanskrit. I was considering the issue for an unwritten
language, Vedic Sanskrit, which was eventually recorded in the script
developed for an early Prakrit.
I had never realised that Sanskrit's retroflex plosives were the
plosive ghosts of the softenable PIE gutturals (k^ etc.).
Richard.