Re: Phonemes

On Sep 8, 1:35 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 8, 1:42 pm, DKleinecke <dkleine...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:



A fairly long time ago Yusuf and I had an exchange about the phonemes
of Arabic. I suggested that vowel length was a phoneme and he objected
that Arabic had short and long vowels.

I want to consider vowel length and gemination as phonemes of Arabic.
They behave like consonants in the sense that they can be third
component of a syllable. They do not occur elsewhere (in my
analysis).

The reason I want to do this is that if they are separate phonemes I
can define the second and third forms of the verb as infixes rather
than as processes of change.

Back when I learned about phonemes - mostly from Mary Haas, but also
Hockett and Ken Pike - this would have been allowed. Has phoneme
theory evolved so much since then that vowel length and gemination are
no longer legitimate phonems?

If so, can you sketch the reason why?

"Modern" phonology claims to operate on a syllabic level, but they
don't have the courage of their convictions and still break syllable
onsets and codas into "C" and "V." I suppose they would treat length
as a syllable feature rather than a segment feature (but it's easy
enough to check -- McCarthy's dissertation is a phonology of Biblical
Hebrew).

Does phonology own phonemics these days? Back in the old days
everybody took a shot at it. Some of them didn't understand what they
were doing - but we just rephonemicized it. If I remember correctly
Hockett wrote at least one article reanalyzing somebody else's
analysis.

In the Arabic world I would treat emphasis, at least in the neo-Arabic
languages as a supersegmental (I think it extends beyond syllables)
feature. I could see how length could be a syllable feature but I
can't see any advantage to it. Must I subscribe to one of those odd
metric theories before I can do phonemes?

Erica Reiner's *Linguistic Analysis of Akkadian* (1966) treated length
as the symbol <colon>, which could attach either to the right or to
the left to make any adjacent segment long, thus capturing a
morphophonemic generalization (Akk. has most of the same Forms as
Arabic).

I find a colon is too tiny in most of the fonts I use so I use the
equals sign instead. If I were to make length a feature that
lengthened the following syllable I could convert the third form from
an infix to a prefix. People might prefer that. If I were to make it
lengthen the following vowel I could unify the infix action with the
8th form. But I am not all sure I want to do these things.

And the parallel version with gemination is kind of mind-boggling. I
view the gemination as the probable outcome of some feature like
nasalization in which case it is a little less frightening. The two
consonant roots (doubled verbs) I assume only acquire geminations
latterly.

All this is interesting but not exactly what I am asking. I am not
asking SHOULD I make such an analysis - only whether one is possible.

.

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