Re: why can't the BBC

Ekkehard Dengler (in sci.lang):

Joachim Pense wrote:
Ekkehard Dengler (in sci.lang):

Peter T. Daniels wrote:
On May 24, 1:09 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <h7jf349fjs08oo6o3cb1sjm8durhkkd...@xxxxxxx>,
Ruud Harmsen <realemailons...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

....
Yup. You need a lot more than 1 Hz to make a meaningful (i.e.,
contrastive) distinction between vowels.

You guys are so easily distracted by irrelevancies.

What I said was, if they contrast, even if they differ by only 1 Hz,
then they are phonemically significant (the point being that the
acoustics is irrelevant, all that matters is the relationships).

Except that a contrast has to be noticeable to be significant.


Would two sounds produced by a speaker necessary be considered
phonemically equal if they sounded alike but produced in different
ways?

How would one acquire a phonemic distinction between auditorily
indistinguishable sounds?


I am thinking of a transitional phenomenon during language change. The
sounds would merge acoustically, but the way they are produced would
remain, and writing would preserve it for a while. The difference would be
kept up alive in the speakers' minds through morphological analogy etc.

The "trivial" realisation of this scenario would be if sounds vanish, the
typical final silent e. The silent e is preserved in French writing, of
course, but also in poetry - I don't know if anyone considers the silent
French e as a phoneme different from null.

I admit that I cannot think of many non-null realisations of the concept
that aren't artificial. Perhaps the /f/-/T/-distinction discussed elsewhere
in this thread, or the voiceless Japanese vowels, but those might still be
acoustically distinguishable.

Joachim
.

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