From: Arnaud Fournet
Message: 61216
Date: 2008-11-02
----- Original Message -----
From: G&P
> Right, there is a sound like [w] in French,
> now the issue is : what is its status ?
It is not uncommon for different analyses of a language to make slightly
different decisions about what is or is not a phoneme. Contrastive pairs
are not enough; it all depends whether the segments are re-analysed as an
allophone of something else.
For example, not many people suggest that English has the phoneme [รง] (that's
the German ich-laut, in case the symbol doesn't appear properly), but the
sound certainly occurs, and in contrastive pairs (e.g. hue and who).
Should it be a phoneme, or not? More significantly for me, some linguists
won't accept voiceless [W] as a phoneme, but in my dialect it undeniably is.
So a debate about whether a sound is or is not a phoneme is probably not
about the sound at all, or about the language, but about the choice of
analysis.
Peter
=======
I agree to some extent,
but the debate includes the features of the language studied as the data in
that language must be the primary source of decision,
If the method does not care about data,
then something must be wrong.
Arnaud