From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wupost!emory!gwinnett!depsych!rc Sun Dec  1 13:06:56 EST 1991
Article 1783 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Xref: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca comp.ai.philosophy:1783 sci.philosophy.tech:1247
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>From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Natural languages are formal systems?
Message-ID: <6FF0BB1w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>
Date: 1 Dec 91 04:53:40 GMT
References: <1991Nov30.111206.14666@news.Hawaii.Edu>
Lines: 51

lee@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Greg Lee) writes:

> In article <9myTBB1w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM> rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richa
> 
> >...  The human phonetic system is about as well
> >understood as any aspect of reality and seems to be a good
> >candidate to serve as a model for other, as yet not fully grasped,
> >aspects of language. ...
> 
> It's a good candidate for a model, because it might have happened
> that our capacity to manipulate symbols evolved as an internalization
> of our capacity to manipulate speech sounds.  Or rather, it would
> be a good candidate, if Carlson's rosy estimate of the state of
> phonologists' understanding were correct.  Take it from a phonologist:
> we understand very little.  For instance, Carlson mentioned an
> analogy to the Periodic Table of the Elements.  It's a reasonable
> analogy, since the phonemes of a language can be organized roughly
> into a rectangular array, and for the same reason that the elements
> can.  Speech sounds are made by moving several largely independent
> articulators -- lips, tongue, and so on.  But all human languages
> have holes in those rectangular patterns, and there is no theory
> that is completely successful at predicting what holes may occur.


No, there isn't any way of telling which of the finite and
specifiable number of possible phonemes will be chosen to convey
meaning in any particular language, any more than there is a way
to tell in advance of analysis which of the chemical elements are
in a particular substance, say water, which has only 2 elements
from the entire periodic table.

My point was that Jakobson's ("Prague school") structuralist
phonology, based on the anatomy and physiology of the human mouth
and throat, organizes the potential phonemes like elements in the
periodic table -- which makes it as scientific as anything in the
sciences of human behavior -- but also reveals each phoneme to be
made up of features which are distinctive for it -- e.g. voiced
versus unvoiced and stressed versus unstressed -- which means that
it has a "structure," which can be lost sight of when represented
by a single grapheme, such as a symbol of the International
Phonetic Alphabet.  (Logical analysts tend to see verbal behavior
as "strings" of "discrete" "elements" -- like the letters of the
alphabet --and I was attempting to highlight the notion that even
the sounds of speech themselves do not have this discrete
character but are mini-structures of phonetic features.)

--
Richard Carlson        |    rc@depsych.gwinnett.COM
Midtown Medical Center |    {rutgers,ogicse,gatech}!emory!gwinnett!depsych!rc
Atlanta, Georgia       |
(404) 881-6877         |


