* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| A linguistic dictionary told me[1] that segments are any kind of
| speech fragment. Is that correct?

* Peter T. Daniels
|
| 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.

This sure is difficult. Minimal in the sense that they are atomic?
Wouldn't that mean that segments are letters, period? Can syllables be
segments, for example? It would seem that they cannot, since syllables
are not atomic.

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

That I didn't understand. How can anyone claim that the term "segment"
is independent of theory?

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| 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?

* Peter T. Daniels
|
| It's not the smallness, it's the simultaneity. [b], for instance, has
| features including [+ voice], [+ labial], [- continuant],

Aha! So I can't pronounce a feature on its own simply because a
feature is just an aspect of a sound, and not an entire sound. So if
"voice" is a feature it may not be too short to be pronounced, but I'd
need to combine it with other features in order to have something to
pronounce at all? So I can't pronounce "voice" on its own, I need to
have voice + labial, voice + alveolar, or voice + velar to be able to
pronounce something with voice?

| or however you choose to define your features.

Oh. So there isn't a closed set of features? There are different
theories proposing different sets of features?

| In "boon," for instance, [+ voice] continues throughout the word,
| while other features go on and off.

Right. Are features always properties of phonemes, meaning that a
phoneme can be fully and uniquely characterized by its features?
So {[+ voice], [+ labial], [- continuant]} == 'b', for example?

Let me ask one test question to see if I understand this: is the the
tall/deep distinction in Shavian featural?

<URL: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/shavian.htm >

* Peter T. Daniels
|
| They're not classes, they're types. It's a typology. You might even say
| they're ... prototypes.

Do you mean to say that types in a typology and prototypes (defined by
means of an example) are the same thing?

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| 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.

* Peter T. Daniels
|
| 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.

In that case I misread

<URL: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/qalam/message/534 >

That I never understood how you could make such a claim fits well with
your insistence that you haven't made it. :-)

| 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.)

Right. Those are the key indications that the typology has something
wrong with it, but I not that we don't seem to be entirely rid of
those descriptions yet. Given that there are cases like Orkhon it
seems difficult to get rid of all of them.

--Lars M.