"syllabicity"

Rich Alderson ALDERSON at netcom.com
Thu May 20 01:11:13 UTC 1999


On 13 May 1999, "Patrick C. Ryan" <proto-language at email.msn.com> wrote in reply
to my posting of May 11:

>>1.  An original three-vowel system /i u a/, with length, developed allophonic
>>variants [& O:] of /a/ under lengthening processes.  Cowgill argued this as
>>the source of Brugmann's Law in Sanskrit in a paper presented at the LSA in
>>the early 70's; it solved the *e/*o problem for me, so I have adopted it.

>You are, of course, free to *believe* anything you wish but just the first
>premise in this description is untenable because unprovable: an original
>/i u a/.

The five-vowel system licensed by the comparative method can be reduced to a
three-vowel system by a judicious application of internal reconstruction while
doing no injustice to the facts of the language reconstructed, or to linguistic
universals in general, unlike the system proposed by Lehmann.

>>But this is the very point I was making:  The definition you cite from Trask
>>is structuralist, rather than psychological, and not the definition of the
>>phoneme used by Natural Phonology.  Further, even in a structuralist
>>definition, one is not allowed to restrict the word "meaning" as you wish to
>>do, and so your argument for a "non-phonemic vowel" falls apart.

>I think you may be a bit overly "school"-oriented. I still that Lehmann was
>under no obligation to be consistently structuralist; and I do not feel a
>similar restraint myself.

If by "overly 'school'-oriented" you mean that I accept the findings of one
particular theory of phonology in preference to other competing theories, I
plead _nolo contendere_.  If you mean rather that I think Lehmann *must* do
everything as a structuralist because he did most things as one, you misunder-
stand my entire point:  I do not insist that if he did anything as a structur-
alist he must do everything that way; rather, I am simply stating the fact that
on the evidence of his writings themselves, he *did* do things strictly as a
structuralist.

								Rich Alderson



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