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

[David L. White]

        Look, either we admit that English speakers could coin /lith/ vs
/lidh/, whereas Japanese speakers could not coin /biri/ versus /bili/ or we
(somewhat obstructionistically) do not.  If we admit it, there must be an
explanation.  The view of "the phonemic principle" that I and several others
have been pushing provides this, while the view that Mr. Whiting has been
pushing does not.  I personally prefer to construe the concept of "phoneme"
in such a way that meaningful and accurate predictions, which yield an
increase in understanding of linguistic behavior (even hypothetical), can be
made.
        The sort of distributional standards that are commonly used to
determine phonemes can fail to predict what speakers are sensitive to and
able to control.  For example there is in one African language (I forget
which, but I think it is in the Nuer Dinka area) which has predictable
long-range nasalization that speakers are sensitive to.  The long-range is
the key, because the nasalization, though abstractly predictable, is not
predictable from phonetic implementation.  (Speakers do not really feel
compelled to open their velums the whole way, as opposed to the way that
English speakers feel compelled to aspirate under certain circumstances.)
In a case like this, the question of whether nasalization is or is not
phonemic depends on what we want the word to capture.  I prefer it to
capture speakers abilities, enabling us to predict (among other things) what
coinages are possible and what are not.  Mr. Whiting evidently prefers it to
capture distributional truths, among other things.  As I said before,
perhaps over-charitably, we will have to agree to differ.
        It should be noted that the matter of boundaries, how many types
there are and how (other than elegance of description) they are to be
detected, is not so clear as some would have us think.  For example, it is
fairly common in Old English for what we think of as the first element of a
compound to be written as a separate word.  Nor is it clear that the sort of
boundaries we have been talking about are properly described as
"morphological", as any account of phonetics and phonology described in
their own terms would at the very least have to include a recognition of
word boundaries.  But if we admit that at least there are stronger
"word-like" boundaries on the one hand and things quite a lot weaker than
that on the other, then the matter of "kuchen" can be handled by treating
the diminutive as "ku-chen" or even, more radically, "ku chen", with "chen"
as a somewhat exceptional word (given a looser definition of the word
"word", which does not after all have a revealed meaning).  The
pronunciation referred to does indicate the presence of a strong boundary of
a fundamentally different type, general rather than merely morphological,
compared to the boundary in something like Latin "paribus" (however we
divide that).

                                                            Dr. David L. White