Peter:
> No you can't. Any language in which a distinction between vowel phonemes
> serves to distinguish minimal pairs cannot be so analysed.
> Let's see you try with English bird board bard beard burred.
We've all seen some crazy linguistic ideas floating around. I'm sure
there's an article somewhere out there on 'English monovocalism'. Hmm,
let me perform a websearch. I'm curious... :)
Okay I found this posted by Marc Hamann on the linguistList
(
http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/8/8-279.html). Now, since part of the
issue here involves taking abstraction way too far, I will indirectly
quote the sensible Alexis Ramer's own words via Marc Hamann's account
of them whilst pretending it was my own amidst the confusion :P
"'(a) the so-called monovocalic hypothesis treats */e/ and */o/ as
variants of the same MORPHOphoneme (i.e., the same UNDERLYING
segment), not the same PHONEME, in PIE, and to count these two
as one phoneme would be like counting all the vowels of Hebrew
or Arabic as one phoneme, [...]'"
Precisely. Or English for that matter. So maybe /u/ in 'run' and /a/
in 'ran' are the same vowel! Of course, it's completely absurd. There
has to be a limit but some people feel less bound by logical constraints
than they should be by the constraints of a tight-fitting straightjacket.
= gLeN