Re: Phonemes
- From: "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 22:33:07 GMT
David Wright Sr. wrote:
>
> "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in news:42B319AF.7AB2
> @worldnet.att.net:
>
> (snip)
>
> > David Crystal gives charts of the largest and smallest inventories in
> > the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Largest is a Khoisan language
> > with four or five articulations for each of the clicks, totaling
> > 80-something IIRC; smallest is Rotokas, with 11.
> >
> > Why would there be a theoretical maximum?
> >
>
> Thanks for the leads.
>
> I would suspect that there would some upper limit, (not necessarily absolute,
> but variable within some limits), to the number of phonetic variations that
> could be used without running into serious confusion between them.
"Not necessarily absolute but variable within some limits" is the very
antithesis of "theoretical maximum"!
Malayalam has seven points of articulation for the nasals.
> My original basis for asking this was due to a story by my favorite author[1]
He was my introduction to sf; I read all the kids' books because they
were in the Fort Washington branch of NYPL. Then I found Asimov and
hardly ever looked back. Everything from Stranger in a Strange Land and
Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is sheer madness, and for some reason I looked
back at Starship Troopers and found that it went even back to there.
(BTW those bottom-notes are very annoying.)
> written in 1948 called 'Gulf'. In it, the author using the work of Ogden and
> Richards in Basic English, and Alfred Korzybski in General Semantics, and
> implicitly, some linguist[2], postulated a language called 'speedtalk'. In
It doesn't really sound like Bloomfield's sort of thing, but Jespersen
was into conlangs. Sweet wrote dismissively of them in the 11th
Britannica.
> simple terms, speedtalk was based on the notion of one phoneme per word for
Then it is by definition not a possible human language -- there's no
duality of patterning!
> the roughly 800 words of a language similar, but not strictly based on Basic
> Language. In concept, the structure of the language was more along the lines
> of LogLan.
I should think 800 phonemes would be thoroughly impractical, but not
that it's "theoretically" impossible.
> The notion of one phoneme per word has very obvious problems, not alone
> considering what I suspect would be caused by running into a much reduced
> upper limit, but also having serious problems with a lack of redundancy. IOW,
> I simply don't believe that it would possibly work. Of course, he did
> postulating that the speakers of this language were 'homo novis', the
> beginning of a new sub-species of man whose 'superman ability' was the
> ability to 'think better'. see:
> http://tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said_the_tensor/2005/05/gulf_by_robert_.html
> for a critical review on the story.
>
> Anyway, as much as I respect this author and like his works, I think that he
> was trying to either overlook limitations of real linguistics, or that he
> simply had an incomplete understanding of linguistics, to make a plot point.
They always did.
> I was just curious as to what people might think on the notion of a practical
> upper limit.
It's entirely different from the notion of a theoretical maximum.
> [1] Who? - you ask. Just check many of my sig-files.
>
> [2] Probably Bloomfield.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: Phonemes
- From: Brian M. Scott
- Re: Phonemes
- From: David Wright Sr.
- Re: Phonemes
- References:
- Phonemes
- From: David Wright Sr.
- Re: Phonemes
- From: Peter T. Daniels
- Re: Phonemes
- From: David Wright Sr.
- Phonemes
- Prev by Date: Re: Phonemes
- Next by Date: Re: Luxenberg's critique
- Previous by thread: Re: Phonemes
- Next by thread: Re: Phonemes
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
