Message-Id: <9202080218.AA00852@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>
Date:         Fri, 7 Feb 1992 17:53:44 -0500
Reply-To: Logical Language Group <cbmvax!uunet!GREBYN.COM!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!lojbab>
Sender: Lojban list <cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!LOJBAN>
From: Logical Language Group <cbmvax!uunet!GREBYN.COM!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!lojbab>
Subject:      phonemes
To: John Cowan <cowan@SNARK.THYRSUS.COM>,
        Eric Raymond <eric@SNARK.THYRSUS.COM>,
        Eric Tiedemann <est@SNARK.THYRSUS.COM>
Status: RO

And Rosta responds to me:
>>There is one other facet in this - since Lojban speech is audio-visually
>>isomorphic, any 'real' sound would also appear in writing.  The buffer
>>sound, if audible, is not written.  There is no symbol for it - by
>>definition it is NOT a phoneme of the language.
>
>It may not be a lerfu, or the approximate Lojban equivalent of phoneme, but
>in no phonological theory is there being a graphical symbol for some
>sound a necessary and sufficient condition for that sound being a phoneme.
>In traditional phonemic analysis I guess the buffer vowel would tend to
>be analysed as a phoneme (which happens to be prone to deletion).

My understanding of the definition of a phoneme in a language is that it
forms a minimal pair with some other phoneme of the language.  The
buffer is not a Lojban phoneme by definition then, because it ALWAYS has
an allophone of null, it forms no significant pairs with anything.  Now
if you want to say that null is inherently a phoneme, because the
alternative in any position is non-null, go ahead.  But that is the most
trite of phonological rules.

I want our phonology description to be something people can understand.
What linguists come up with as a formula for competence in Lojban is for
the linguists to decide.  Considering the buffer to be a Lojban vowel
merely because linguistically it is a sound classified as a vowel is
counterproductive, because while it makes clusters look like other
syllables, the Lojban morphology isn't defined by a syllable structure
per se, but by the patterns of vowels and consonants either separately
or in clusters as appropriate.  Defining a cluster as /C-C/ where - is
some phoneme makes it look on paper like it isn't a cluster, and it is
important to our morphology that clusters be perceived DIFFERENTLY from
CVC patterns.  You end up adding noise to the description that makes it
harder to teach the language concealing important patterns under
unimportant manufactured ones.

To say that the buffer is perceived psychologically runs counter to what
I have read.  I think the more accurate psychological representation is
that [specific-consonant]+[buffer] is perceived as an allophone of
[specific-consonant].

>I argued that hearers try to map any phone onto some phoneme.  So unless
>the buffer vowel is very very different from the six Lojban vowels it
>will get mapped onto one of them.  So, if someone speaking English uses
>[y] (a.k.a.  "u-umlaut"), I will first of all try to map it onto /u:/.
>So on hearing [byt] I'd guess _boot_ was intended.

There is some level of linguistic noise that doesn't get mapped onto any
phoneme.  The buffer is an allophone of [noise] %^).  From the hearer's
point of view, the buffer doesn't exist unless consciously looked for
(which isn't a linguistic function but a metalinguistic or
paralinguistic one).  If an English speaker says a word using a [y], I
will not try to map that sound to any English phoneme because I know it
isn't an English phoneme.  Unless I have clues from context/familiarity
with the speaker to know that his/her accent atypically-to-observer-me
reflects some English phoneme in the form of [y] (as I have come to
understand in private email with Chris Handley may be true for his [oo]
of "moon"), I will recognize the sound/word as a foreign borrowing or
nonce usage.

I personally believe that in fluent speech we perceive words that we are
familiar with as psychological wholes, not as strings of phonemes.  The
descriptive phonology of Lojban is a teaching tool for non-fluent
speakers, not a reflection of psychological reality.

lojbab