Re: B. Cthia and Nom Saul Epstein Wed, 23 Apr 1997 13:27:39 -0500 From: Rob Zook Subject: Re: B. Cthia and Nom >>The sounds a language recognizes as distinct are called its phonemes. A >>phonetic category of sounds that occurs as a phoneme or part of a >>phoneme in a language is said to be phonemic to the language. > >Well, hmm..,_Foundations of Linguistics_ has this to say about >phonomes: > > ..,and proposed a general principle that complementary > sounds that resembled each other sufficiently could be regarded > as members of the same structural element know as a PHONOME. > This conclusion is possible only if we specify the exact > pronunciation of the phonome according to the PHONOLOGICAL > ENVIRONMENT, by rules such as the following: > > Tamil /t/ is pronounced as: [dh] between vowels; > [d] after /n/; > [t] elsewhere. This is pretty much the same as my understanding of the term phoneme. I notice you consistently spell it "phonome," which is not a word I'm familiar with. I just realized that my own definition of "phonemic" should be changed to say "a phonetic category of sounds that occurs as the primary allophone of a phoneme in a language is said to phonemic to the language." The variant expressions of a phoneme are its allophones. >Note: the [dh] represents the voiced dental fricative represented >by the international phonetic symbol which looks like a "d" with >a cross thru the top, but I could not figure out how to get >Eudora to let me enter that symbol. With NUMLOCK on, hold down the ALT key, enter 0240 from the numerical keypad, and release the ALT key. But don't expect the symbol to survive shipment in all cases. ;-, >>A glottal >>stop is not phonemic to English, nor to any Indo-European language I'm >>familiar with. (It is phonemic to many pre-Columbian American >>languages, and to Semitic languages.) > >A glottal stop is not phonemic all by itself. However,if I'm not >mistaken, in English, the glottal stop is part of the /t/ phonome >in certain dialects. (Like saying i:', instead of i:t for "eat"). True. That's another example of why English speakers find glottal stops difficult to hear _as_ glottal stops, and why apostrophe seems such a natural symbol to us: it sounds like an ommission rather than a sound in its own right. >>As speakers of languages without >>a glottal stop phoneme, we hear such sounds, if at all, as gaps in the >>pronunciation of a word, spaces between other sounds. For instance, the >>commonly occuring English negation, "uh-uh," could be transcribed in ZC >>as '^'^. But the apostraphes are not there because there is simply a >>pause between the two syllables. They are there because we begin each >>syllable by closing our throats at a point called the glottis -- hence >>glottal stop. > >Why would that not make the glottal stop part of the /^/ phonome? I suppose it would. I didn't say English forbids glottal stops: I said they weren't phonemic, meaning distinct. There are a lot of sounds that are part of English phonetics as parts of phonemes. Intervocalic (between vowels) /t/ and /d/, for instance, in Standard American English are both often pronounced as a trilled [r] ala Spanish. But the trilled [r] is not phonemic to SAE. >>You may be able to hear the difference by comparying "uh-uh" to the >>affirmation, "uh-huh," which could be transcribed in ZC as '^h^. In the >>negation, the two halves of the glottis meet at the beginning of the >>first syllable, open for the vowel, close and open again for the second >>vowel. In the affirmation, the two halves of the glottis close to begin >>the first syllable, open for the vowel, spread wide to devoice the >>vowel (the /h/ sound), then approach each other again (but don't close) >>for the "second" vowel. (Voicing is caused by the two halves of the >>glottis being close enough together that the air passing between causes >>them to vibrate.) > >Or part of the /h/ phonome? There seems to be a rule of English phonology barring sequences of vowels (as opposed to diphthongs) and utterance-initial vowels. So we throw in all kinds of things -- glottal stops, glottal fricatives, the approximants /j/ and /w/ -- to prevent those two situations from occurring. You could say that each of English's vowel phonemes includes an allophone [?V] -- where ? is a glottal stop and V is the vowel -- which occurs at the beginning of utterances and possibly after an occurance of the same vowel or after a central vowel, and an allophone [jV] which occurs after front vowels, and an allophone [wV] which occurs after back vowels. One could not say in our "uh-uh" vs. "uh-huh" example that ' alternates with h as allophones of a single phoneme. The two sounds occur in an identicle context, ^_^. >The "ts" represents a voiceless dental stop (but I don't know >the terminology to tell you how it's different from "t"). But >when I pronounce it almost sounds like a dental-aveolar fricative. /ts/ is what's called an affricate: a stop with a fricative release -- or a fricative with stopped onset. ZC's is another affricate, as is the initial sound of the German "pfennig." >It seems to me you have anthopomorphize "the Other" a bit more >than I would have. I regarded "the Other" a bit more metaphorically. That's all right. Any anthropomorphisis on my part is meant metaphorically. (I think of it as personification anyway...) >>>Now, we just need a vulcan verb that means to "grok" >;-| >> >>Yeah. It might be related to "nehau." > >Well, nehou means "feelings, vibes". To grok, means (almost) >to "fully understand, and integrate into oneself". Literally >in old martian, I think Heinlein said it meant to "drink >deeply". And I was seeing a relationship between "grok"s suggestion of deep understanding and "nehau"s suggestion of knowledge that precedes investigation or analysis. But they don't exactly go together, do they? -- from Saul R. Epstein liberty uit net