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

Tue Jul 15 16:04:21 UTC 2025

Let me add a little story to this interesting discussion, although it 
might not be absolutely relevant:
In several varieties of Joola (Senegal), there are two distinct words 
for ‘milk’ : m-ɪɪɬ-am ‘woman's milk’ and m-iiɬ-əm ‘cow's milk’. In both 
cases, the initial m- is a noun class marker, and the ending is a kind 
of minimal determiner of the shape -AC, where C is a consonant identical 
to that of the noun class marker (hence /m/ here), and A is either /a/ 
(-ATR) or /ə/ (+ATR) harmonizing with the radical vowel. The funny thing 
is as follows: all the speakers that I could ask so far say these two 
words are really different. And, it is true that the auditory perception 
of /a/ and /ə/ are obvious for me. But when it comes to the difference 
between /ɪ/ and /i/, my french ears cannot perceive it nicely. More 
investigations (from asking Ian Maddieson's impression to echography) 
did not yield any conclusive solution. /ɪ/ and /i/ seemed to resist. So 
i cut the audio signal as to keep only the long /ɪ/ and the long /i/, 
and submitted these sounds to my consultants. They were actually unable 
to distinguish between the two supposedly distinct vowel qualities. In 
other words, two acoustically identical vowels could trigger two 
acoustically distinct suffixes. Isn't this a nice example of the 
diffference between phonetics and phonology?

Guillaume

Le 13/07/2025 à 18:45, Larry M Hyman via Lingtyp a écrit :
> 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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