Re: More Arabic vowels


Ruud Harmsen wrote:
Wed, 13 Sep 2006 19:14:48 -0400: "Brian M. Scott"
<b.scott@xxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:

It's a bit terse, but it's correct. Someone who writes /aw/
and /u:/ in the course of describing a language thereby
identifies /a/, /w/, and /u:/ as phonemes of the language.
That's three phonemes, plus whatever phonemes haven't been
named here. That number is independent of the realization
of those phonemes. In particular, /aw/ is still a sequence
of two phonemes even if it's realized as [o:].

What's the notation if /aw/ should be seen as a single phoneme?
Can it be, given that /a/ and /w/ also exist as separate phonemes?
If not, why is /ts/ a phoneme in German and Russian, although /t/ and
/s/ also exist? Same for English /tS/? What are the criteria for such
decisions? Are they hard and fast, or are multiple solutions possible?

I can't say anything about Russian, but in German and English, the
affricates pattern like stops, not like clusters. There's no reason not
to consider them "unit phonemes."

What if a diphthong's starting and end points resemble sounds that
also constitute separate phonemes, but aren't quite that? Is the
diphthong allowed to be a separate phoneme then?

Rather, you need to wonder why a diphthong _shouldn't_ be considered a
phoneme. If it patterns like simple vowels, then why not recognize it
as such?

(It's less problematic in English because there are so few phonetically
"pure" vowels anyway.)

Example: Dutch <ij>/<ei>, which is often said to be /Ej/, but is in
fact more often [æe] or [E:] etc. depending on region and speaker.
Is it one phoneme, or does it have to be two, and if so, why?

We already talked about this, using this specific example. Once you
introduce regional and individual differences, you are no longer
talking about a single phonological system. You can write a description
for the entire language (in post-Bloomfieldian mode) using Smith's
"morphophone," but the morphophone approach got swamped out by the SPE
approach, which does away with the phonemic level entirely. (Halle, as
I keep repeating, threw out the entire nursery with the bathwater.)

.

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