Newsgroups: sci.lang
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From: rwojcik@atc.boeing.com (Richard Wojcik)
Subject: Re: Russian vowel  bI
Message-ID: <1995Mar31.164904.9015@grace.rt.cs.boeing.com>
Sender: usenet@grace.rt.cs.boeing.com (User that posts news)
Reply-To: rwojcik@atc.boeing.com
Organization: Research & Technology
References: <3lgnp3$63d@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu>
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 1995 16:49:04 GMT
Lines: 86

In article 63d@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu, djbpitt+@pitt.edu (David J. Birnbaum) writes:
>>>... 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.
>>
>>... 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.
>
>Modern Russian is a language where linguists have traditionally viewed
>palatalization as a phonemic feature of consonants but an orthographic
>feature of the following vowels. There have been serious proposals to the
>contrary, but these require jer phonemes in final position, a level of
>abstraction that does not fit into everyone's phonemic theory.

I would say that these serious proposals also require the outright rejection of
phonemic theory itself.  I would argue (and have) that the proponents of such
analyses have lost the distinction between phonology and morphophonology, 
which was fundamental to linguistic theory originally, and which some linguists
still maintain is fundamental.  We aren't talking about a terminological
dispute here, but different linguistic paradigms.

>The problem with making generalizations about the relationship between
>phonemic structure and orthography is that alphabets designed for a
>particular phonemic system may then be borrowed by a language with a
>different phonemic structure. As a result, a single letter may come to
>represent multiple phonemes, and allophones may come to be represented
>by different letters. Similarly, the phonemic structure of a language may
>change while its alphabet remains the same, which is the traditional
>interpretation of the modern Russian situation.

Right.  In fact, all modern languages have changed out from under relatively
stable orthographies.  I believe that the failure to make generalizations about
the relationship between phonemic structure and orthography is, well, a failure
to make significant generalizations about the language.  If alphabetic writing
is phonemic, then one ought to point that out.  The question here is whether
allophones can ever be assigned to distinct letters (or graphemes) of alphabetic
writing.  That is the question.  What makes it difficult to prove in a definitive
manner is that alleged cases of allophonic assignment might really be cases
of graphemes corresponding to phonemically-definable conditioning factors--
e.g. the point I was making about palatal and nonpalatal [t] in English.  The fact
that there are so few >potential< cases of allophonic correspondence to letters
suggests that we ought to look at those few cases very critically. 

>Trubetzkoy saw the absence of a letter for /j/ from Glagolitic as evidence
>of the absence of a /j/ phoneme from Cyril's Old Church Slavonic. I am among
>the Slavic linguists who are not persuaded by this argument; Cyril did not
>have the opportunity to study phonological theory with Trubetzkoy, and
>Trubetzkoy does not present compelling evidence that the phoneme/letter
>mapping in an invented writing system must be perfect. This problem was
>discussed exhaustively by Daniel Collins in die Welt der Slaven about
>four or five years ago.

I wish I were familiar with the controversy.  I would say that you can't base a
phonemic argument on writing alone, but it surely ought to be considered as
prima facie evidence.  I agree with you that this sounds like very weak evidence.

BTW, I don't believe that you are arguing against linking orthography to phonology,
which would be silly.  After all, we distinguish Old Russian from Old Church Slavonic
through scribal errors.  The issue here is whether [i] and [y] can be said to represent
distinct phonemes in modern Russian, and I would be interested in your opinion.  I
have a weak spot in my heart for the Moscow School of Phonology anyway, so I
would not die if the two sounds turned out to be allophonic.  One could always claim
that the distinction made by modern Russians in those few words is basically 
paralinguistic--like the English distinction between uh-huh and uh-uh that gets
brought up in this newsgroup periodically.  After all, native Russian linguists have
debated this issue ever since Shcherba rejected Baudouin's analysis.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+
| Richard H. Wojcik               |  Boeing Computer Services  |
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