Nahuatl and CJ [vowel length question]

[David Robertson]

Hi, I'd like to add a couple of notes to the CW vowel-length discussion.
I've had interesting feedback off-list from a couple of linguists to whom
I'm grateful for their thoughts and time.  What follows involves my
characterization of what these two scholars said, so I may not be
representing their views with complete accuracy.  I also emphasize the
speculative nature of my comments, as well as the possibility that I just
need a good night's sleep.  :-)

Linguist #1 pointed out that you don't absolutely need minimal pairs to
establish phonemic contrasts.  You can instead prove that there's no free
variation between two sounds you suspect are phonemically opposed.  And
you'd want to show there's no conditioning environment that explains the
appearance of two distinct sounds.  Not being a phonologist by specialty I
think I stick to (probably overly) conservative ways of "proving"
phonological contrasts, specifically to finding minimal pairs.  Linguist #1
noted there are many languages which have virtually no minimal pairs.  But
my reaction is to wonder whether these are non-isolating languages (thus
different from CW; see below), whether the lack of minimal pairs is limited
to surface, uttered forms, and whether at a just slightly more abstract
level we can easily find minimal pairs, e.g. among Salish roots.

At any rate I can't deny that you can make a solid analysis of a
phonological system without strict minimal pairs.  But I'm left with my
probably naive suspicion that somehow the functional load (~the work of
distinguishing meanings) on any phoneme whose existence is established
without strict minimal pairs might be very light indeed.  (Again I note the
isolating nature of CW, with no affixation, ablaut, tone, etc.; in brief,
every morpheme is a full word and by rights ought to be able to be a member
of a minimal pair.)  Now whether this would affect the speculations that I
included with my first message on CW vowel length is a matter I leave to
smarter heads, but it seems to me that the situation I've described could
make for an unstable phonological system.

Linguist #2 offered a simple and compelling observation, that
("prototypical") pidgins display small lexicons and only rarely a
significant proportion of minimal pairs.  Maybe it's the very scarcity of
lexical items that disfavors homophony.  I've never thought of things in
exactly that way before but this is a compelling observation.  Has a
crosslinguistic study among pidgins, maybe creoles too, been done of
homophony?  (I expect polysemy is rampant.)  Might lack of homophony amount
to that elusive critter, a structural universal of pidgins (comparable with
McWhorter's claims in his 2002 "The Rest of the Story..."), just as lack of
reduplication (Bakker 2003) seems to be?  And to connect with my previous
comments, do pidgin phonologies tend to instability?

Speculative questions all.  Thank you for indulging.  Maybe some of the
variation in CW vowels can be chalked up to the conventional wisdom that
vowels simply tend to be less stable than consonants, and that variant
forms can coexist in a language for long periods of time.

To Henry Z, thanks for pointing out the important fact that in some
circumstances nonlinguistic considerations lead to the use of a particular
description of a language.

--Dave R.

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