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<p>Let me add a little story to this interesting discussion,
although it might not be absolutely relevant:<br>
In several varieties of Joola (Senegal), there are two distinct
words for ‘milk’ : m-ɪɪɬ-am ‘woman's milk’ and m-iiɬ-əm ‘cow's
milk’. In both cases, the initial m- is a noun class marker, and
the ending is a kind of minimal determiner of the shape -AC, where
C is a consonant identical to that of the noun class marker (hence
/m/ here), and A is either /a/ (-ATR) or /ə/ (+ATR) harmonizing
with the radical vowel. The funny thing is as follows: all the
speakers that I could ask so far say these two words are really
different. And, it is true that the auditory perception of /a/ and
/ə/ are obvious for me. But when it comes to the difference
between /ɪ/ and /i/, my french ears cannot perceive it nicely.
More investigations (from asking Ian Maddieson's impression to
echography) did not yield any conclusive solution. /ɪ/ and /i/
seemed to resist. So i cut the audio signal as to keep only the
long /ɪ/ and the long /i/, and submitted these sounds to my
consultants. They were actually unable to distinguish between the
two supposedly distinct vowel qualities. In other words, two
acoustically identical vowels could trigger two acoustically
distinct suffixes. Isn't this a nice example of the diffference
between phonetics and phonology?</p>
<p>Guillaume<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Le 13/07/2025 à 18:45, Larry M Hyman
via Lingtyp a écrit :<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAMQd4M1qRf2X5S9pxqBJshtZux=MfDHiF04Knz5kzOcrr-bChA@mail.gmail.com">
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<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" moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a>>
wrote:<br>
</div>
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style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<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>
<table style="font-size:80%">
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<td>Tel.:</td>
<td>+49/361/2113417</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>E-Post:</td>
<td><a href="mailto:christianw_lehmann@arcor.de"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">christianw_lehmann@arcor.de</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Web:</td>
<td><a href="https://www.christianlehmann.eu"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://www.christianlehmann.eu</a></td>
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<div><br>
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<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"
moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~hyman</a><br>
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