Wikipedia has a rather cursory treatment of the term Phoneme, and I noticed that there was almost no mention of the possibility of choosing alternative analyses of phonemic systems such as the English vowel system, in spite of the fact that there was a great debate during the early and middle 20th century (before Generative Phonology) around this topic. It was usually known as the “God’s Truth vs. hocus-pocus” debate. A key paper was Yuen Ren Chao’s catchily-titled ‘The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems’. When I first taught in the Linguistic Science Department at Reading University we used to get the first year Linguistics students to read the various papers on the subject in Martin Joos’s collection of papers Readings in Linguistics 1 (I never liked the sequel, Readings in Linguistics 2). To be honest, I don’t think the students really enjoyed reading them. Still, it seems odd that so many publications on the phonemes of English still seem stuck in the God’s Truth camp. It seems to be commonplace to state without reservation that English (well, RP) has twenty or more vowel phonemes. Sometimes writers note in passing that this is a bigger total of vowel phonemes than one finds in the world’s other languages. It is, indeed, massively bigger, considering that most other languages have only a handful. Yet it is perfectly possible (as I have pointed out before) to analyse the vowel phonemes of English in a different (perhaps hocus-pocus) way that reduces their number to seven or six, if one should wish to.
I have now added a section to the Phoneme article called “The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions”, and I am waiting to see if anyone objects to it. So far, it has just received one attack of vandalism!
A happy New Year to all.
I have now added a section to the Phoneme article called “The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions”, and I am waiting to see if anyone objects to it. So far, it has just received one attack of vandalism!
A happy New Year to all.
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