Lars Marius Garshol wrote:

>
> * Lars Marius Garshol
> |
> | Now we're getting somewhere. What is a segment?
>
> * Peter Constable
> |
> | If you're familiar with the notion of a phoneme,
>
> I'm not, unfortunately. (That's why I asked for good introductions to
> phonetics.) They seem to be like letters, but subtly different. (The
> description I looked at said they were different, but not how.)
>
> | that is close to the notion of a segment. In phonology and
> | phonetics, the simplifying assumption is made that the speech stream
> | can be segmented into discrete units.
>
> A linguistic dictionary told me[1] that segments are any kind of
> speech fragment. Is that correct?

I woke this morning to 66 messages. I'll try answering questions that
other people haven't addressed yet.

No. "Any kind of speech fragment" might refer to "utterance," perhaps,
but a segment is a minimal speech fragment, a component of a syllable,
viz., a consonant or vowel or etc.

"Phonemes" are artifacts of theory and analysis. "Segments" are the
things that get analyzed.

> | Each of these would be atomic in the sense that is something that
> | can be more or less independently articulated. There are also
> | aspects of phonology that are "supra-segmental". These are
> | characteristics of the speech stream that can span multiple
> | segments: e.g. stress, tone, intonation.
>
> So, if we return to Daniel's restated definition of featural scripts,
> which was a script "in which graphic elements correlate with features
> of pronunciation, i.e. notions smaller than the segment," this seems
> to start to make some kind of sense.
>
> Features of pronunciation are so small they can't be independently
> articulated, and if the characters of a script have graphic elements
> that correlate with such tiny features of pronunciation they are
> featural. Right?

It's not the smallness, it's the simultaneity. [b], for instance, has
features including [+ voice], [+ labial], [- continuant], or however you
choose to define your features. In "boon," for instance, [+ voice]
continues throughout the word, while other features go on and off.

> The question then becomes: what features of speech are so tiny you
> can't articulate them on their own? Is it things such as that a sound
> is labial, palatal, or velar? So if a script uses, say, a hook at the
> top of a character to say that it represents a labial sound you have a
> featural script?

*All* features cannot be articulated separately.

> * Lars Marius Garshol
> |
> | Mainly because the modifications used to indicate the vowels are not
> | entirely systematic. There is a system, but it has deviations which
> | must be learned. Thinking about it I guess I agree that despite them
> | Ethiopic fits the class "abugida" better than it does "syllabary".
>
> * Peter Constable
> |
> | As Peter D mentions, these classes don't have fixed boundaries, and
> | the objects are not classified by a set of strictly required
> | criteria. The classes have prototype definitions (see Lakoff's
> | "Women, fire and dangerous things" for further discussion), and the
> | best we can do is point to prototypical examples.
>
> Now I am confused. If this is true, why are the definitions of these
> classes given in WWS, and also in response to my questions, given in
> terms of the properties of scripts, and not in terms of prototypes?

They're not classes, they're types. It's a typology. You might even say
they're ... prototypes.

> Peter Daniels has kept describing his typology as historically based,
> but I've so far failed to understand what he means by that, given that
> none of his definitions even refer to historical aspects of the scripts.
> Also, his types have instances that are historically (or genetically)
> distant, so what's historically based about his typology I just don't
> know.

I didn't do that. I said that when I noticed the distinctions between
syllabary and abugida, and between alphabet and abjad, I realized the
historical implications of these vast differences.

Before 1987, people didn't recognize there were four different kinds of
things there. (They said things like "incomplete" or "impure" or
"hybrid" or "semi," etc.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...