Re: Graphemes defined

Michael Everson wrote:

>
> At 09:24 -0400 2004-05-10, John Cowan wrote:
>
> >From what I understand, linguists do not deal in phonemes any more,
> >except in the restricted sense in which physicists deal in Newtonian
> >physics: a useful approximation of pedagogical value that is known to
> >be inadequate to explain the phenomena.
>
> I may be badly jetlagged, but no one told *me* that phoneme theory
> had been discarded.

Ever since Halle 1959, The Sound Pattern of Russian.

(His point was that in Russian, some vd/vl pairs are phonemic and some
aren't but are merely phonetically conditioned; therefore "phoneme" is
excess baggage.

(Yet one can't help noting that the autosegmentalists, and tiered
phonologists generally, insist on a C and V level, whereas phoneticians
know that syllables and features, not segments, are where it's at.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...