3 posts tagged “phonology”

I often wonder, what do we need in spelling? Would we rather have a completely phonetic spelling, or rather a phonemic spelling?

For example Sanskrit goes incredibly far in almost being an ancient form of IPA, it has so many distinctions which are purely  based on speech, and phonetics rather than the phonemes. Now my Sanskrit isn't very good, but keeping track of all those Sandhi's seems like a real pain (I'll get back to you when I finish my class this year ;))

While Dutch goes through enormous effort in its spelling to be phonemic. As you may or may not know, Dutch has word final devoicing, so a word like Dood 'death' is actually pronounced [dot]. The reasoning why we then still used a <d> rather than a <t> is because the verb doden 'to kill' does have a phonetic [d]. This process is also done for word final /b/. But it is not done for word final /v/ and /z/. so ik geef 'I give' but: zij geven 'they give'. Why they ever chose to have this terrible spelling inconsistency is beyond me. But it does make you wonder, which one is better?

Dutch goes even further in phonemic rather than phonetic spelling. For example, the third person agreement suffix is /-t/, the reasoning is, if we're going to suffix it behind every verb with third person agreement, we're also going to suffix it to words in which you can't hear this /-t/!

So you have the notorious verb worden 'become' ['ʋɔrdən]:
Ik word  'I become' ['ɪk 'ʋɔrt]
Hij wordt 'He becomes' ['hɛɪ 'ʋɔrt]

Word final -dt?! Yes, word final -dt.

Now this seems to all make grammatically sense, but for most people it is terribly difficult to make a distinction that isn't made in speech.

There's far more of these kind of odd pairs.

words which alternate between -d- and double -dd- without a phonetic distinction for example:

De beantwoorde vraag 'The answered question'
Ik beantwoordde de vraag 'I answered the question'

Now this is all well, we're still not spelling Irish right? But it still makes you wonder, how 'necessary' is to write what is said 'underlyingly' rather than exactly what you hear. Throughout times it has become more and more normal to write phonemically rather than phonetically, but besides the orthographies becoming more elegant, the spelling also tends to become a lot more difficult.

So really, readers, I'm just curious, what do you think is necessary? A phonemic spelling? A phonetic spelling? Or a combination of letters that vaguely resemble the sounds of the word that is meant? (English :P)

All right, I dug up a table of the different syllables that exist in the Chinese language.* And I figured now would be as good a time as any to reduce the horribly unphonemic pinyin to the truely underlying phonemes.

I was surprised to find out that most gaps are easily explicable, and that Chinese only has two phonemic vowels: a and e/o. I named e/o E, it seems that o occurs when it is near labials.

Now according to my theory, every word is made out of this phonemic structure:
C-Y-V-(Y/N)

Where C is the initial consonant.
Y is the glide y or w
V is the vowel a or e.
and N is the nasal n or ng.

All of these parts can be either there, or not, as long as there's at least one element, it'll be a valid syllable (although some are restricted)

Now there's some interesting things to be seen.
Labial+w initial clusters don't exist except when not followed by a vowel. Which is easy enough to understand due to the labial nature of that glide. Besides that, it's interesting to notice that the c, ch, s, sh, z, zh and r don't occur when there's no glide on second position.

The only problem I had was getting rid of the words with ü, like nü. Right now I have that one as /nyay/ which is almost definitely wrong I can't think of any good reason why a phonemic /nyay/ would display [ny] phonetically. Nevertheless, the  ü  glides  are much too small of a class to actually be phonemic, or so I'd like to think. It is of course possible.

I was delighted to see that j/q/x were just allophones g/k/h in front of front vowels and the y glide.

now there's the word final r. that comes from enclitic er. I think that this might phonemically be /ra/ but I'll have to look into it.

Now I'll provide a little pdf, which will need some explanation. The first three pages are pretty much the pinyin spelling, but compressed into the phonemic system which I think looks right. The next three pages contain the same table, but this time with my proposed phonemic spelling. the purple background entries are the ones I'm least sure about.

Please enjoy, and this is probably very confusing, I'll try to structure it more later on.

http://members.home.nl/marijnvanputten/chinphon.pdf

*out of this terrible habit of mine, whenever I refer to Chinese, I mean mandarin Chinese, which is the only Chinese language I'm remotely familiar with. Please excuse this perpetual misnaming.

Ninja Edit:

It seems like I'm not the only idiot who came up with the two vowel system:
http://xiang.free.fr/leiden-en.pdf
See page four of this article.

I'm not really sure whether I should be happy or whether I should cry. On the one hand, it's amazing that I found this myself in one day, without any prior knowledge of this research, on the other hand, I did not find a breakthrough new theory. Haha. Oh well. They do still analyse that darned ü to exist though. I'd like to have that out of the way. But signs indicate that I probably cant. Oh well.

I'll soon make a full sketch of the Mandarin Phonology the way I see it.

Lately I've had some questions from several friends what the Centum & Satem split is about. Mostly because I have fairly controversial theories on this. So whenever I talk about Centum vs. Satem language split, and my theories about it, people generally end up asking me what Centum and Satem languages are exactly. Therefore I thought I'd write a definitive post to once and for all end these questions.
I also figured it would be nice to have some slightly easier entries on this blog about Proto Indo-European (PIE) as well. It's not unlikely that I'll write more non-Indo-Europeanist friendly entries in the future.

This blog entry will be about the sound shifts that take place in Proto Indo-European, and the languages that sprout from these. I will especially focus on the so called Centum & Satem split. Which has to do with the `velar series' in PIE. First I'll explain what these `velar series are', after that I'll explain the definition of the Centum & Satem split, and to conclude I'll give practical examples of words in Centum and Satem languages.

In PIE you have the so called `velar series'. Groups of three types of consonants with a velar articulation.
In a row they are the:

• Palato-Velars ḱ ǵ ǵʰ
• Plain Velars k g gʰ
• Labio-Velars kʷ gʷ gʷʰ

What's special about these Velar series, is that every Indo-European language only retains two of them. The so called Centum languages retain the Plain Velars and Labio-velars, and the Satem languages retain the Palato-Velars and the Plain velars.

So in Satem languages Plain Velars and Labio-Velars merge to k sounds, while Palato-Velars stay distinct. And in Centum language Plain Velars and Palato-Velars merge while Labio-Velars stay distinct.

Centum is the Latin word for `Hundred' and `Satem' the Avestan word for hundred. These words  come from the Indo-European word *ḱmtom `Hundred'. This is especially illustrative, because Latin has the "K" sound here (although these days we would pronounce it as s, originally it was K) while Avestan retains the palatal articulation, and actually exaggerates it so much it becomes an s (which is the general tendency of Satem languages).

This split in how these velars are treated are generally thought to be a big split in two dialects of PIE, and this would mean a Centum language and a Satem language would never be able to form a subgroup in the Indo-European family tree together.

In the next few paragraphs I'll illustrate the difference between Centum and Satem. I'll do this by taking three words, with the three different types of velars. Then I'll show how they are reflected in a Centum (English) language and a Satem (Sanskrit) language respectively.

The three words I'll compare are the words for 'Hundred', 'Light' and 'What'.

Centum languages:
English (a Centum language) has hundred where the h comes from palatovelar ḱ (root is also *ḱmtom).
The English word light  comes from the PIE root *leuk- with a plain velar which also becomes h (and later gh, but Old English spelling still has leoht.)

Thus the Palatovelar and and Plain velar have merged into h.

The English word what comes from the Indo-European word *kʷod `what'. Here you can see how  kʷ  (a Labio-velar) became wh and not h as with the plain velars and palatovelars.

So clearly Labio-velars are distinguished from the other velars.

Satem languages:
Sanskrit (a Satem language) has śatám for hundred also the root is *ḱmtom  so the ś comes from ḱ.

The Sanskrit word for light though is roka from the root *leuk-, here you can see the ḱ stays clearly distinct from the k. as k stays k while  ḱ becomes ś.

The Sanskrit word for `what' is kád which comes from the Indo-europed word *kʷod. As you can see here the labiovelar became k, and through that merged with the plain velar.

So to sum it up. English has h for Indo-European ḱ and k. And it as wh for Indo-European kʷ.

Sanskrit has ś for ḱ. And it has k for k and kʷ.

I hope this illustrates the concept Centum and Satem languages. And how the split works. Interestingly enough, a few Anatolian language (not Hittite though, that's a Centum language) retain the full three series, so they can't be defined as Centum or Satem.

As said before the general consensus is that Centum vs Satem split is something dialectal in Indo-European itself, I personally am not very convinced of this theory, which I'll try to explain in later updates.