Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!uunet!in1.uu.net!eskimo!rickw
From: rickw@eskimo.com (Richard Wojcik)
Subject: Re: Russian vowel  bI
X-Nntp-Posting-Host: eskimo.com
Message-ID: <D6A86x.4tI@eskimo.com>
Sender: usenet@eskimo.com (News User Id)
Organization: Eskimo North (206) For-Ever
References: <3kcq7c$167k@news.ccit.arizona.edu> <1995Mar29.145311.11345@news.cs.indiana.edu> <D68CGy.8F3@eskimo.com> <3lf6uq$crf@news.ycc.yale.edu>
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 1995 01:59:20 GMT
Lines: 81

In article <3lf6uq$crf@news.ycc.yale.edu>,
Ken Balakrishnan <kbalakri@minerva.cis.yale.edu> wrote:
>Richard Wojcik (rickw@eskimo.com) wrote:
>
>: Alexis made the point that Russians had no difficulty pronouncing these
>: words differently from those beginning with the letter "i".  It was not
>: just a question of spelling, or I would agree with you.  Actually, neither
>: Alexis nor I am a native speaker of Russian.  You are.  So tell me, do you
>: find the articulation of an initial /y/ (vs. /i/) to be in any way
>: artificial or unnatural?  I am not asking you about the knowledge that such
>: words are somehow foreign-sounding, which might be attributed to
>: morphological intuition.  I am asking how you feel about ease of
>: articulation.  Note that English has foreign borrowings such as the
>: expression "raison d'etre", which is often pronounced with a kind of French
>: accent.  Do the words beginning with /y/ sound like a kind of foreign
>: accent to you?  If so, then they may well violate Russian phonology.
>
>: How natural is it to use the name of the letter in a sentence?
>
>: can pronounce it freely.  Prounounceability is a cardinal property of
>: phonemes.  
>
>
>All these statements suggest that your criteria for phonemes rely to some 
>extent on the speaker's intuition.  It seems to me that this intuition is 
>heavily dependent on a speaker's alphabet.  For instance, if the English 
>alphabet just happened to distinguish between "hard" and "soft" /t/ (e.g. 
>to point up the difference between the /t/ of "tooth" and "teeth"), 
>English speakers would probably have no trouble distinguishing the sounds 
>in Russian and would transliterate Russian place names with the 
>appropriate letter.

How would you define phonemes in such a way that you did not rely on the
speaker's intuition?  Basically, phonemes are distinct phones that can
be used to distinguish words.  How do the words get distinguished if not by
a person's mind?  As for your "tooth/teeth" example, I'm not sure that I
can buy it.  The symbols would probably come to be associated with the
vowel phonemes (or letters) following the symbols rather than with the
allophonic variants of /t/.  It is easy to make the case that alphabetic
writing gets mapped onto phonemes, and very difficult to make the case that
it gets mapped onto allophones.  Historically, linguists have tended to see
a strong link between alphabetic writing and phonemic contrasts.

>  Moreover, it would be only natural for the names of 
>the two letters to reflect the difference in pronunciation.  If this were 
>the case, would your phonemic inventory for English include such a contrast?

It isn't natural at all for allophones of the same phoneme to be used in a
contrastive way.  If you have two phonetically distinct pronunciations of
letters, then you are using different phonemes to contrast them.  I can
think of no other language in which the letters of the alphabet have names
that violate the phonology of the language.

>Conversely, it is easy to imagine that, if the Russian alphabet did not 
>reflect the old difference between *y and *i, the standard Russian 
>pronunciation of the initial vowel of the Siberian place names you mention
>would not differ from other initial /i/, except for those people who 
>happened to know something about the native phonology of these places. 
>So if the Russians did not have an alphabet and you were going to design one 
>for them, would you include letters for both [i] and [y]? 

Yes, if they could create distinct words such as [ibo] and [ybo].  The
argument made by Alexis was that modern Russian speakers can do that quite
freely.  That is evidence of a phonemic contrast, and about the only thing
that could save you from it is to derive [i] or [y] from more abstract
sounds--possible, but you need compelling evidence (unless you hail from
MIT, in which case you only need hubris  :-).

>My own answer to these questions is "no", as I work from the premise that 
>the phonemic contrasts of a language do not depend on the speaker's 
>(conscious) awareness of them.  Of course, others have every right to 
>make different assumptions.

I hope so, Ken, especially since conscious awareness of phonetic
distinction has always been a hallmark of phonemic distinction.  ;-)  Of
course, one is always free to redefine words.  You can even make "bad" mean
"good".  So far, you have only told me what you think phonemes are not.
Please tell me what you think they are.
-- 
Rick Wojcik  rickw@eskimo.com     Seattle (for locals: Bellevue), WA
             http://www.eskimo.com/~rickw/
