Richard Wordingham wrote:

--- In phoNet@yahoogroups.com, "H.M. Hubey" <HubeyH@M...> wrote:
> Of course. There has to be some correlation between perception and
> articulation. "nearest-neighbor"
> refers both to the perceptual and articulatory properties but if
they
> are correlated then "no problem".
>
> It is because they are correlated that linguists can freely give
both
> articulatory and acoustic
> descriptions of phonemes with the implicit assumption that one can
be
> derived from the other
> to a good degree of approximation.

A very detailed articulatory description should imply the acoustics,
but I'm not sure that the relationship can always or accurately be
inverted. 

It cannot. It is known that the same sound can be produced by different articulatory
configurations.

If it was as easy as you say, phoneticists wouldn't use
palatograms and the like in field work. 

I prefer using phonetic descriptions. It is the rest of the [historical] linguists who want to
stick to articulations.

I thought there was a
reference to the tools of the trade in the archives, but I couldn't
find it.  However, take a look at the references in Message 343 for
rhoticity.

A partial engineering analogy is with attitude.  If you represent it
by three angles, e.g. by successive yaw, pitch and roll motions
about axes fixed in the body, you find a singularity at a pitch of
±90°.  (The singularity is in the representation, not the nature of
attitude.)

More to the point, it seems that [p\], [f], [T], [s] and [x] are all
close to [h].  Or are we just looking at a shift from a fricative to
an approximant when these fricatives fade out?  Voiceless
approximants are silent :)

I would guess, that [historical] linguists would judge

1, p/f to be close (place)
2.  s/x to be close (fricative) and also because of Iranian and rest of IE e.g. s/x
3. some could say f/s (fricative)

I don't know what [T] represents.

A really good book on this topic is Edwards, Applied Phonetics. If you want
perception and phonetics, then Lieberman and Blumstein.

Richard.



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-- 
Mark Hubey
hubeyh@...
http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey