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

[randylapolla]

Thanks very much for your message, Christian. I agree completely, particularly as the position of the “citation” tone can differ with the prosody (different focus structures). But the Chinese linguists have been doing philology (trying to understand the pronunciation of old texts) the same way since at least the third century CE. So their habits of how to think about things are deeply ingrained and not easy to change, as we saw in the reaction to Mantaro’s talk.

The Min varieties are rather late to the party, being a yet to be completed amalgamation of different migrations from different places around the 4th century (there is brilliant work by South Coblin on this), and the Min area was not really part of the mainstream of Sinitic culture until around the 8th or 9th century. So studies on Min varieties are a relatively recent phenomenon, but the methodology is fixed. A colleague of mine in Singapore worked on a Min variety spoken in Guangdong, but tried to talk about the language in purely modern terms, ignoring the traditional Chinese way of talking about Sinitic languages, but he couldn’t get accepted at conferences or get his papers on the Min variety published. So I advise my students who are documenting Sinitic varieties to use modern approaches, but also include discussion using the traditional Chinese approach. Otherwise they would have a hard time in the field.

Jerry Norman and W. South Coblin wrote a paper in 1995 arguing that the traditional Chinese way of doing historical phonology (essentially philology) did not really help us understand the languages, and suggested using natural data and the historical comparative method. Radical, huh?
But that went over like a lead balloon. Coblin has kept it up, though, and has made amazing progress in understanding why the non-standard varieties are the way they are (esp. Hakka, Gan, and Min). He has a small group of young Chinese linguists who accept his view and are also doing great work on the different varieties. Nice example of following Max Planck’s dictum:“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’' (Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers)

Randy

> On 17 Jul 2025, at 3:05 PM, Christian Lehmann via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:
>
> Hi Randy and David,
>
> assume that you form the set of sandhi forms (say, allophonic variants of a word form) of a base by a set of rules; then the methodological problem is to determine the base which allows for the most simple and general set of rules. It seems to me that it is a prelinguistic idea to assume that this base is the citation form. The citation form is necessarily a form in pausa. But pausa is a rather specific context. Just for another example, you would not want to derive the variants of the nominative singular of a Sanskrit masculine noun from the citation form. It may be an interesting methodological question to investigate whether there is something like a neutral phonological context in which a word form appears which may serve as our base form.
>
> Christian
>
> --
>
> Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
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