Re: Subtitutes for English /T/ and /D/

In article <pte3a35hbfgaggnp356jne60l3v80guojl@xxxxxxx>,
Ruud Harmsen <realemailonsite@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 15:35:22 -0400: Nathan Sanders
<nsanders@xxxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:

Plenty of languages make phonemic use of
"almost indistinguishable" contrasts.

Yes, that must be it. Is anything know about the functional load of
such phonemic distinctions? I suspect they must be low.

I'm not sure functional load is really all that useful of a concept.
There isn't an agreed-upon definition of it (largely because there are
many problems in trying to define it: type versus token frequency,
phonemes that happen to be in complementary distribution, etc.), and
as far as I know, no one has yet shown any interesting correlation
between functional load and anything not already in their working
definition of functional load.

Phonemes either are or are not. They will naturally fall along a
frequency continuum (perhaps fitting some sort of frequency law like
Zipf's Law, skewed by the history of the language), but phonemes at
the low end don't, as a class, display any consistently different
behavior (either synchronic or diachronic) from phonemes at the high
end.

Phoneme frequency (and by extension, functional load) seems to play no
role in the grammar or evolution of a language; otherwise, someone
would have come up with a phonological feature like [?frequent] by
now! Much more important are acoustics, audition, aerodynamics, and
articulation, all of which are reflected in phonological features in
some way.

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/
.

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