Re: BBC does it again

In article <6bjoi1F3ajnvmU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Harlan Messinger <hmessinger.removethis@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Nathan Sanders wrote:
In article <6bfph8F3bhorjU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Harlan Messinger <hmessinger.removethis@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Nathan Sanders wrote:

Other Englishes are different languages. Why should different
languages be given the same phonemic model?
Why not come up with a different model for each individual speaker? It

Indeed. Why not?

If you happen to come up with the same phonemes, great. If not, no
big deal. If two speakers have different minimal pairs, then I see no
reason why their phonemes should be the same.

Typically they don't, and this is all beside the point. I'm talking
about not discarding the ability to generalize a phonemic system to as
broad a group as possible, which you don't seem to want to do.

What I'm wary of is confusing diachronic and synchronic analyses, as
phonologists have been doing since, well, since phonology has existed.

Related languages/dialects arise via language change. Deciding where
to draw the line between active processes and historical (but yet
still transparent) change can be tricky.

Are Northern Cities speakers actively fronting /A/ to [a] (pronouncing
"block" much like standard "black"), or is their phoneme /a/,
represented differently than the standard phoneme /A/? What data do
we use to tell the difference between these two analyses?

I know of
no science whose practitioners aren't interested in finding models that
cover the broadest domain possible, so why you're happy to go changing
the phonemic representation every time someone's phonetic realization is
a little different from his neighbor's, even if doing so obscures the
fact that they have two identical phonemic systems, is beyond me.

Because I'm not comfortable deciding what counts as "a little
different" and what counts as "sufficiently different". Are you? If
I pronounce a set of words with [E] and my neighbor pronounces the
same set with [e], is that "a little different"? What if he uses [i]?
What if I use [@]? How far apart in the vowel space can our
realizations be for you to still think they are "a little different"?
What objective, repeatable criteria are you using to decide this?

So do cot-caught merging dialects have different phoneme systems, so
they have nothing to distinguish /O/ from /A/? If so, do we still
need to be beholden to the parts of the phoneme system that seem to
overlap with the non-merging dialects? If so, why not have the same
requirements for French and Spanish?

OK, in that case, perhaps you can't maintain the model. That's a
different proposition.

Can people in whose speech certain phonemic distinctions are no longer
discernible be said to maintain those distinctions in their underlying
cognitive model if they recognize the significance of those distinctions
as used by others?

It depends on what you mean by "recognize". For most people who merge
cot-caught, they can tell that other speakers are making different
vowels in "cot" and "caught", but would not generally know if the
vowels are being used correctly. That is, the recognize that a
distinction exists, but they can't reliably identify the distinction
correctly.

For example, if a New Yorker called Don with [dOn] and Dawn with
[dAn], the mistake would go unnoticed by a typical Californian, even
if the New Yorker had called them with the reverse names earlier in
the day.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by the brain modeling the pairs.
What aspect of the pairs do you think needs modeling? That speakers
think of, say, [E] and [e:] as "the same thing, only different in
length"?

Well, for example, some people must have thought length to be a
significant enough characteristic such that, given [ɑ] and [a:], or [?]
and [a:], they thought to use the same letter for them, perhaps doubling
it (Dutch, Japanese hiragana) or putting an accent over it (Hungarian);
and they did so consistently for e, i, o, and u (except that Dutch has
"ie" for [i:]).

Just as we do in English, with "silent e" and doubled consonants
distinguishing our historically long and short vowels?

Nathan

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

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