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From: rickw@eskimo.com (Richard Wojcik)
Subject: Re: languages with phonetic alphabets?
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Date: Tue, 28 Mar 1995 01:59:51 GMT
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In article <D64HvA.4t0@spss.com>, Mark Rosenfelder <markrose@spss.com> wrote:
>In article <D62nrq.G1I@eskimo.com>, Richard Wojcik <rickw@eskimo.com> wrote:
>>Russian differs from English in that the spelling is can be linked to
>>phonemes in a more predictable and consistent fashion, but there is very
>>little one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and letters of the
>>alphabet.  Just for starters, there is a complete mismatch between vowels
>>and consonants.  Russian has only 6 vowel phonemes--i,y,u,e,o,a (5 if you
>>count [i] and [y] as a single phoneme), but it has 10 vowel letters [...]
>>Cyrillic consonants, reflecting an
>>earlier phonemic pattern, simply fail to correspond to the
>>palatalized/nonpalatalized dichotomy in the phonemic system.  Vowel letters
>>are by and large used to signal whether or not a preceding consonant is
>>palatalized.  At the end of a word, the "soft sign" (miagkii znak) is used
>>to signal a final palatalized consonant.  So the vowel and consonant
>>letters do not really correspond to Russian phonemes much of the time.
>
>Technically you are correct-- there's not a 1-to-1 correspondence between
>phonemes and letters-- but this is taking a very narrow view of a phonemic
>script.  I'd say the Russian script *is* pretty phonemic.  It simply chooses
>to mark the palatalization feature of the consonant using the following
>symbol, instead of on the consonant itself.  This destroys the 1-to-1
>correspondence, but not the phonemicity of the script; the phonemic
>information is all there, and the system thereby offers a considerable
>savings in graphemes.  A transliteration using a Roman or Roman-based
>script, including IPA, is more cumbersome without giving more information. 

That is what I meant when I said that Russian letters can be linked to
phonemes in a more predictable and consistent fashion.  The graphemic
system employs far fewer symbols.  However, the original point--that each
sound had its own symbol--was incorrect.  If Russian had a one-to-one
phoneme/letter correspondence, it would actually use more symbols than are
in the current alphabet, and therefore have a less efficient graphology,
right?  

>>It gets worse.  Not only is there a very active rule of vowel reduction,
>>but the voicing of consonant clusters is usually based on the final
>>consonant (contrary to English, which tends to base it on the initial
>>consonant).  
>
>If these are regular rules, why do they affect the phonemicity of the script?

At this point, we need to consider the nature of phonemic mergers and how
they ought to be represented.  What is the optimal way of representing
phonemic overlap in alphabetic writing?  Sanskrit happens to use a more
shallow representation, but most of the world's writing systems seem to
prefer a deeper representation.  Hence, we do not tend to represent vowel
reduction in our formal spelling system, although it is the cause of many
spelling errors, both in English and Russian.  If you were to represent
Russian "with" in "s Borisom" with a "z" letter, you would be more accurate
from a phonemic point of view, but you would impede morphological
recognition.  So it is best to keep the writing system the way it is, but
it further removes the script from being a pure correspondence with
phonemes, at least in a superficial sense.  (Few modern linguists follow
Baudouin's original use of the term "phoneme" to mean the most abstract
phonemic representation of the sound in a morpheme.)
-- 
Rick Wojcik  rickw@eskimo.com     Seattle (for locals: Bellevue), WA
             http://www.eskimo.com/~rickw/
