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>From: lee@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Greg Lee)
Subject: Re: Natural languages are formal systems?
Message-ID: <1991Nov30.111206.14666@news.Hawaii.Edu>
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Date: Sat, 30 Nov 1991 11:12:06 GMT

In article <9myTBB1w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM> rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson) writes:

>...  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.

--
Greg Lee <lee@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu>


