[Lingtyp] contrast between [ɪ] and [e]

[Larry M Hyman]

Thanks for these further clarifications, Christian. I agree with everything
you wrote. Concerning [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, [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 [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  [ɪ] or [e] would be second degree,
/i/ being first.

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. Although working on tone for decades, I had
never thought of this.

On Sun, Jul 13, 2025 at 4:27 AM Christian Lehmann via Lingtyp <
lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:

> 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.
>
> 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 [ɪ] and [e] 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.
>
> 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 [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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> --
>
> Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
> Rudolfstr. 4
> 99092 Erfurt
> Deutschland
> Tel.: +49/361/2113417
> E-Post: christianw_lehmann at arcor.de
> Web: https://www.christianlehmann.eu
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>


-- 
Larry M. Hyman, Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School
& Director, France-Berkeley Fund, University of California, Berkeley
https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~hyman
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