Re: Re[4]: [tied] Re: [pieml] Labiovelars versus Palatals + Labiovel

--- On Sun, 11/2/08, G&P <G.and.P@...> wrote:

> From: G&P <G.and.P@...>
> Subject: RE: Re[4]: [tied] Re: [pieml] Labiovelars versus Palatals + Labiovelar Approximant
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Sunday, November 2, 2008, 3:58 AM
> > 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 [ç]
> (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).

hue, which I perceive as /çyu/, is the example I give to my students as what's closest to Spanish <j> and soft <g>. My Arabic professor, years ago, also suggested "hue" for Arabic /H/.

>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.

Can you give an example?

>
> 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