Peter T. Daniels scripsit:

> I've never seen [Alpher's] first name before. Seems like it's his parents he
> ought to resent. (Cf. a character on *Happy Days*.)

Good point. In full it's Ralph Asher Alpher.

> > Anyway, I see the difference as one of degree, not as one of kind.
>
> He may bear legal responsibility, since they used his name to sell
> books, but he's not responsible for the ideas. They're all in Halle's
> 1959 *Sound Pattern of Russian*.

Ah, that was ambiguous on my part. I mean that there's a continuum between
classical phoneme-thinking and SP{E,R}, and that the relatively modest
examples I gave stand closer to the former than to the latter.

--
Samuel Johnson on playing the violin: John Cowan
"Difficult do you call it, Sir? jcowan@...
I wish it were impossible." http://www.ccil.org/~cowan