<div dir="ltr">Thanks for these further clarifications, Christian. I agree with everything you wrote. Concerning <span style="font-family:"Liberation Serif",serif">[</span><font color="#212121" style="font-family:"Liberation Serif",serif">ɪ] and [e] not being defined in terms of acoustic features, I'm not sure what phoneticians would say, but as a phonologist this has always been clear (and I should have made it clearer in my comments). Besides Daniel Jones' cardinal vowel prototypes, we have feature systems which are designed to capture generalizations. In a binary feature approach, </font><span style="font-family:"Liberation Serif",serif">[</span><font color="#212121" style="font-family:"Liberation Serif",serif">ɪ] would be [+high, -back, -ATR], while [e] would be [-high, -low, -back, +ATR]. In terms of defining concepts in terms of a system, this is why I mentioned the harmony relationship between </font><span style="font-family:"Liberation Serif",serif">[</span><font color="#212121" style="font-family:"Liberation Serif",serif">ɪ] or [e] and /ɛ/ and the historical merger with *i in 5V systems. Unfortunately we are not always lucky enough for a language to provide compelling phonological facts that will help us determine the featural analysis, so we are stuck with what we think the vowel sounds like (or looks like on a screen). Since this is not clear in many Bantu languages, I have simply followed the practice of the Tervuren school and talked about 7V systems in terms of first, second and third degree vowels, where </font><font color="#212121" style="font-family:"Liberation Serif",serif"> </font><span style="font-family:"Liberation Serif",serif">[</span><font color="#212121" style="font-family:"Liberation Serif",serif">ɪ] or [e] would be second degree, /i/ being first.</font><div><font color="#212121" style="font-family:"Liberation Serif",serif"><br></font></div><div><font color="#212121" style="font-family:"Liberation Serif",serif">Since you mentioned Daniel Jones, I thought I'd share something that Matthew Dryer brought up with me in Canberra in 2011 where our two-week workshop consisted of three groups investigating "How to Study a Tone Language" with native speakers of three New Guinea languages. When the issue came up of how to recognize tonal contrasts, and I answered too simplistically, Matthew pointed out that we don't have cardinal tones to help us categorize pitches.</font><span style="font-family:"Liberation Serif",serif;color:rgb(33,33,33)"> Although working on tone for decades, I had never thought of this.</span></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Jul 13, 2025 at 4:27 AM Christian Lehmann via Lingtyp <<a href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><u></u>
<div>
<p lang="en-US" style="line-height:100%;margin-bottom:0cm">
<font face="Liberation Serif, serif">Thanks for this discussion.
Some
discussants emphasize that the data linguists are faced with
display
variation and arbitrariness at all 'lectal' levels while others
insist on the search for underlying principles that reduce the
freedom. One might say that that is a moot ideological dispute
because both parties have a point. It seems clear that the
proponents
of systematicity can hope to advance our knowledge of language
only
if the principles (rules, laws) that they establish take the
existent
variation into account. It should be equally clear that the
search
for systematicity in the object area is precisely the task of
empirical science. The unbiased representation of the data and
the
orderly description of their distribution is a presupposition,
but it
is not the goal of science. The goal is to reduce this
description to
the most simple and general form possible.</font></p>
<p lang="en-US" style="line-height:100%;margin-bottom:0cm">
<font face="Liberation Serif, serif">This brings me back to the
dispute - which has popped up on this list more than once - over
the
role of comparative concepts. They are necessary in typology.
Typological assessments and generalizations are couched in terms
of
comparative concepts like 'seven-vowel system vs. five-vowel
system'.
To say that such concepts have no 'lect-independent' status is
dodging the issue. Concepts such as [<font color="#212121">ɪ]
and
[e]</font> have a general, language independent status.
Otherwise
what generations of typologists have said about them would be
gibberish. And of course, they are not defined in terms of
acoustic
features. They are defined by combining a prototype (as Daniel
Jones
once did for vowels) with what E. Keenan once called 'behavioral
properties' like being able to make a contrast in minimal pairs,
getting neutralized together with a neighboring phone in certain
contexts and so forth. The same goes, needless to say, for
concepts
at other levels of the language system like 'passive' and
'antipassive', 'ergative vs. accusative structure',
'agglutinative
vs. isolating morphology' (this is just being used in the
simultaneous discussion on glossing) and so forth.</font></p>
<p lang="en-US" style="line-height:100%;margin-bottom:0cm">
<font face="Liberation Serif, serif">And such concepts are
relative
in the sense that they are not put up in isolation but in the
context
of a system of other concepts. Thus, the definition of an [<font color="#212121">ɪ]
is accompanied by a definition of [e], the definition of a
passive
construction goes together with (at least) the definition of
an
active construction, and so forth. The simultaneous definition
of
neighboring concepts renders it possible to apply them despite
their
prototypical nature.</font></font></p>
<p lang="en-US" style="line-height:100%;margin-bottom:0cm">
<font face="Liberation Serif, serif"><font color="#212121">Such
definitions regulate the use of comparative concepts in
language
description and comparison. They regulate whether a particular
phone
in a language will be called [ɪ] or rather [e]. If one took an
agnostic position concerning the validity of one rather than
another
concept in the categorization of a given phenomenon, one would
render
typological work and, ultimately, generalizations about human
language impossible. That is, one would deny linguistics the
status
of a science.</font></font></p>
<p lang="en-US" style="line-height:100%;margin-bottom:0cm">
<font face="Liberation Serif, serif"><font color="#212121">We are
not
talking about whether linguistics is a science in the same
sense as
chemistry is. Nor are we talking about whether all those
comparative
concepts that linguists have been using over the past two
centuries
have been defined well or always been used responsibly. We are
talking about the necessity and possibility of defining and
using
comparative concepts in linguistic work.</font></font></p>
<br>
<div>-- <br>
<p style="font-size:90%">Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann<br>
Rudolfstr. 4<br>
99092 Erfurt<br>
<span style="font-variant:small-caps">Deutschland</span></p>
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<td><a href="https://www.christianlehmann.eu" target="_blank">https://www.christianlehmann.eu</a></td>
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</blockquote></div><div><br clear="all"></div><div><br></div><span class="gmail_signature_prefix">-- </span><br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div>Larry M. Hyman, Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School</div><div>& Director, France-Berkeley Fund, University of California, Berkeley</div><div><a href="https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~hyman" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)" target="_blank">https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~hyman</a><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>