Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut)

[Robert Whiting]

On Mon, 06 Nov 2000 Stanley Friesen <sarima at friesen.net> wrote:

>At 07:08 PM 11/4/00 +0200, Robert Whiting wrote:
>>On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, David L. White wrote:

>><snip>

>>> For English /th/ vs/ /dh/, the question to ask is something
>>> like "In a story where two brothers were named "Lith" and "Lidh",
>>> would an audience be able to keep them apart?"  The answer is
>>> clearly yes, regardless of the various other consideration that
>>> some have noted, therefore the distinction is (not surprisingly)
>>> phonemic.

>>No, the answer is:  if there were two brothers named Lith and
>>Lidh then the distinction would be phonemic.  As long as there
>>aren't, there is no phonemic distinction.  It doesn't matter that
>>the two sounds are capable of being distinct phonemes.  ...

>Actually David has a good point

Yes, but the good point is simply a truism.  When he says that if
these two sounds were used contrastively then they would be
phonemes, that is a good point.  It is like my saying that if I
had a million dollars I would be a millionaire.  You can't argue
with the logic of that.

But when he says that since they could be used contrastively,
then they are already phonemes, that is not a good point.  It is
like saying that since I could easily make a million dollars
(after all, I get several emails every day telling me how easy it
is and offering to sell me the secret for a paltry sum :>), then
I am already a millionaire.  We are all lucky that the IRS
doesn't think this way or else they would be after us to pay
taxes on all the money that we could have earned but didn't.

>(at least if you make it a play rather than a story to be read).
>Try writing a Japanese play with characters named Shil and Shir.
>The result will be confusion and incomprehension.

This is certainly true.  Japanese (and Chinese) just don't
distinguish these sounds.  As a somewhat chilling example of the
extent of the confusion and incomprehension that is possible,
the Singapore Airlines plane that crashed and burned at Taipei
recently was taking off on the wrong runway.  In so doing, it
struck some parked equipment and burst into flames.  The pilot
was supposed to be using runway 50L but was actually using runway
50R.  The presumption is that the controler's instructions were
not understood by the pilot.  It would be funny if it weren't
such a tragedy.  But there is nothing funny about nearly 100
people killed by allophones.

>Or try an English play with characters named Lit and Lit' (where
>/'/ represents aspiration, since we are already using /th/ to
>mean voiceless interdental fricative).  You will get the same
>result.

It is almost impossible to articulate a final unaspirated stop in
normal speech.  To do so, you either have to stop breathing until
you make the next sound or else keep your mouth closed and
breathe through your nose.  Otherwise, as soon as you release the
stop you also release a puff of air.  So it is not surprising
that it is very difficult to contrast final aspirated and
unaspirated stops.

On the other hand, if the brothers were named Till and T'ill, the
audience would have no trouble telling them apart.  It would be
easier if the audience were Chinese, because this distinction is
phonemic in Chinese.  But an English speaking audience would
still be able to tell them apart.  They would probably hear the
initial unaspirated [t] as [d] (the puff of air that constitutes
the aspiration delays the onset of voicing for the following
vowel; without this puff of air, voicing begins earlier and
partly overlaps the preceding consonant).  Not perhaps a
full-bodied [d], but a sound with enough voicing to make it sound
more like [d] than [t].  The English speaking audience would just
assume that one brother was named Till and the other Dill.  Does
this prove that [t] and [t'] are already phonemes in English?
Hardly.

>And this is despite the fact that both the pair /r/ and /l/ and
>the pair /t/ and /t'/ *can* be distinguished, since some
>languages do exactly that.

Oriental speakers are notorious for not being able to distinguish
[r] from [l].  And nobody can really articulate final unaspirated
stops without contortions.

>The the fact that an non-specialist native speaker can *hear* the
>difference is good reason to consider it to be phonemic.

This is just not true.  Native speakers of German can hear the
difference between [ç] and [x].  Does this mean that they are
different phonemes in German?  Not a bit.  No one that I know of
would say that [ç] and [x] are anything but allophones in German.

Let's look at it another way.  I can hear the difference between
bright l and dark l.  Although I have training that helps me, I
suspect that most English speakers could hear the difference;
they are, after all, pretty distinctive.  So suppose the brothers
were named Tilt and Til-t (l for bright l and l- for dark l).
Would the audience be able to hear the difference?  Probably --
although it might take a few repetitions before they were
comfortable with it.  Would that make bright l and dark l
phonemes?  Yes, because they are arbitrary contrasts used to
differentiate meaning.  Does that mean that they are phonemes
now?  Not in English (but if the play were written in Russian
they would have been phonemes before the play, because Russian
uses them contrastively).

What makes different sounds phonemes is their use as arbitrary
contrasts that make a difference in meaning.  The fact that
speakers can hear the difference between two sounds does not make
them phonemes if they are not used as phonemes.  Phonemes have to
have a certain amount of distinctiveness to be used as phonemes
or else you get confusion and ambiguity.  But above this level,
identifying phonemes doesn't depend on how distinctive they are,
but on how they are used.  If they aren't used to make arbitrary
contrasts then they aren't phonemes no matter how distinctive
they are.

>>And as you unintentionally point out, when they become phonemes,
>>[dh] will have to be written <dh>,

>>Not at all.  The natural spelling of /lidh/ in English would be
>Lihthe or something like that (If "lithe" did not already exist
>with a long 'i', that would be the spelling)

Actually you'd probably do better with Lithth or Liththe.  But
the point was that whatever way you come up with for expressing
[dh] it will have to be something that is not used now.  Once
[th] and [dh] can contrast without any conditioning whatsoever,
there will have to be some way to distinguish them graphically or
else you will have a completely opaque writing similar to <ough>.

You will probably say that the writing is already opaque because
you don't have any rules that tell you how to pronounce <th> and
you have memorized the pronunciation of every occurrence of <th>
in the lexicon.  But I have generalized rules for the
pronunciation of <th> because I have better things to do than to
memorize the dictionary.

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi