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

Wed Jul 16 09:07:49 UTC 2025

Randy,

Regarding the tone sandhi, a situation similar to what you describe occurs
also for some speakers of Southern Min varieties in Singapore, with what
appears to be a single citation tone "going to" two different sandhi
tones.  However, the situation can be demystified by reversing the order of
the derivation, analyzing the sandhi tone as the basic one, and deriving
the citation tone from the sandhi tone.  As I recall from when I was
working on this (which was some time back!), there were arguments for and
against both of the possible directions of derivation (citation to sandhi,
or sandhi to citation).

David

On Wed, Jul 16, 2025 at 10:52 AM randylapolla via Lingtyp <
lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:

> Hi Guillaume,
>
> In other words, two acoustically identical vowels could trigger two
> acoustically distinct suffixes.
>
> This is interesting, and should make us think about how we think about
> what is going on in communication. It seems we are not just coding and
> decoding using symbols.
>
> There is something similar in the Southern Min variety of Sinitic spoken
> in the Philippines. Southern Min varieties have been analysed as having a
> complex tone sandhi system where all of the syllables in phrase change tone
> except the last, with each of the nine tones becoming a predictable other
> tone within the system (I’m simplifying a lot here). The interesting thing
> in the variety spoken here in the Philippines is that the historical 3rd
> and 6th tones merged in citation (non-sandhi pronunciation), but still have
> different sandhi forms. So it can’t be that speakers are “converting” from
> the citation tone to the sandhi tone in a generative way.
>
> Randy
>
> On 16 Jul 2025, at 12:04 AM, Guillaume Segerer via Lingtyp <
> lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:
>
> 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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-- 

David Gil

Senior Scientist (Associate)
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig, 04103, Germany

Email: dapiiiiit at gmail.com
Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-526117713
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