Further on "silent" phonemes [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut]

[Anthony Appleyard]

[ moderator changed Subject: header ]

Hereinafter "#" is the schwa. (I am not using `@' here, as some emailers
including mine have a fit of the sillies thinking that any word with `@' in is
an email address.)

  Someone wrote:-
>> However, because of the very complex morphophonemics of Central Numic
>> and the historical changes that have further obscured them in
>> Comanche, this language is full of pairs that look very much like
>> minimal pairs on the surface, but are not. For example, [papi] 'head'
>> and [pavi] 'older brother' look very much like a minimal pair.
>> However, they represent /pa=pi/ and /papi/ respectively.  (The = is a
>> phoneme in Comanche that prevents the lenition of a following stop.
>> It is fully justified on morphophonemic grounds without relying on the
>> historical presence of /n/ in Panamint and Shoshoni which is cognate.)
>> There are a bundle of these:  [ata] 'different' /a=ta/ versus [ara]
>> 'uncle' /ata/, etc.

  Robert Whiting <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi> answered:-
> Fascinating.  Please, sir, what is the phonetic realization of this
> phoneme [=]?  Oh, I just realized -- it can't have a phonetic
> realization or else [papi] and [pavi] wouldn't seem to be a minimal
> pair.  It just blocks some normal phonetic change.  I'm sorry, John,
> but this looks like a device to create a phonetic environment to
> explain why some stops don't undergo lenition when the conditioning
> environment that prevented it has been lost historically. ...

An example of such a "silent phoneme" that some would invent, in a more
familiar language, is the French "h aspire'" that prevents liaison in some
French words, e.g. "le haricot" {l#ariko}, "les haricots2 {leariko}, where
by the above analogy some would write {ariko} as {=ariko}. That this French
so-called `=' phoneme is derived from a pronounced {h} sound, is merely old
history (except in Normandy, where this {h} sound persists, or so I read
once.) Likewise in standard moderm French, final closed {e} as in "je donnai",
and final open {e} as in "je donnais", are now separate phonemes, whereas they
were once likely allophones according to whether or not they were followed by
a now-vanished final consonant.