Re: Phonemes

On Sep 14, 4:59 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You have gone completely mad. If _you_ will reread that thread, you
will see that the only person talking about "neurological basis" is
_you_.

What I said in the posting to which you responded with discussion of
"neurological basis" is that the psychological reality of phonemes had
been amply demonstrated beginning early in the 20th century.

I should have looked up the message in question before I wrote
my reply. Here it is, Oct 19 2006, 2:02 pm. You quote my statement:

Phonemes got a peculiar reality as artefacts of writing and printing

Whereupon you replied:

Except that Bloomfield showed at the turn of the last century
that they "got reality" for Tagalog, and Boas, Sapir and Bloomfield
were among the first to show that they "got reality" for an enormous
variety of languages of Native North America.

Today you told me that "phoneme" isn't largely used anymore
in phonology, and so there would be no state-of-art definition.
Now do phonemes exist or not? and if yes, why is there no
definition? and if there is no definition but phonemes do exist
I propose a definition of my own: Phonemes are units of speech
around a pair of attractors, one being neuronal, linked with the
voice system, and one being physiological. This very provisional
definition is based on my peculiar experience of which I spoke
a lot in here, but nobody took it serious. My method of following
possible sound changes through time, along the arrow of time,
is to pronounce a word or compound silently, over and over and
over again, and observing what happens. I found that when I
voice the words, they are kept in place, but when I pronounce
them silently, without giving voice, not even whispering, no air
at all streaming along the vocal chords, the sounds begin to shift,
the control is gone, physiology takes over. This makes me
quite confident that a polar definition of a phoneme is required,
and I would appreciate it if you could reply without an ad hominem.

.

Relevant Pages

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