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

[Stanley Friesen]

At 10:36 AM 11/15/00 +0200, Robert Whiting wrote:

>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.

Difficult, but I am not sure it is impossible.  Did Classical Greek lack
final tau's? If it had them, then it constitutes an example of a language
that had this contrast.

>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

OK, so try Till (unaspirated) and Dill.  This distinction, also, *can* be
made, since some languages *do* make it.

>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.

No, in proves that in English the unaspirated stops are normally allophones
of the voiced stops, not the unvoiced.

>> 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.

I am not sure of this.  Can somebody give me the scoop on Classical Greek?
Or how about Sanskrit?  Did it have final unaspirated voiceless stops?

>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>.

So?  I see no reason that such a change would be *necessary*.  As long as
people recognize the words as written, does it matter if they accurately
represent the pronunciation?  Oh, sure, a distinction in spelling would
make learning to read and write *easier* - but that is hardly a
*requirement* for a writing system.

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May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com