Allophony and Orthography

[Radagast]

What I tried to imply that you implied was that you implied that some /ji/ are an allophone of /gi/.

And That was exactly what I am implying.

Only that it should then be written: some [ji] are /gi/.

[gsandi]

As a general comment, what you are suggesting (sarcastically or not) for Finnish is exactly what English and French have done. In both languages, you can reconstruct quite well the history of phonetic changes by looking at the vagaries of orthography.

As an almost exact replica of the Finnish vesi < *vete situation you have the English and French words spelled, in both cases <nation>, and pronounced /'neiSn/ and /na'sj?/, respectively.

Had Finnish begun to be written a thousand years before it did, it would not be surprising if it spelled /vesi/ as <vete>.

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Chomsky and Halle spend a whole monograph ("The Sound Pattern of English") demonstrating this for English. They are not wrong (in this case) - it's just not clear why a simple historical English phonology wouldn't have been just as useful.

[Xonen]

Ahh. I've found a way to clarify myself.

In Norwegian we can se that we have two different phonemes synchronically because we have one [j] sound that alternates with [g] before some vowels, and another [j] sound that doesn't. That leads the cunning linguist to think "what causes this alternation?" Then he looks for rules and finds out that in fact all the [j]'s that alternate with [g] are found exclusively before . Then we have a rule /g/ > [j] _i. The reverse rule is much more complex because that would be some [j]'s are realised as [g] before all other vowels than /i/. Clearly the first rule is simpler and therefore preferable.

No. The rule would be that there are two different phonemes, /j/ and /g/, and that the latter just does not occur before /i/.

[Radagast]

Nope. I disagree. That would mean that you would have to phonematise the word "to give" with two different phonemes depending on the conjugation, that would be really opaque in my opinion. It would mean that "give" would be phonemically /ji/ but gave would be phonemically /ga/. It would be out of tune with, the languages history and make an entire class of "supletive" forms with j instead of g.

But as I said basically it comes down to whether you see the /g/>[j]_i rule as being productive or not. If it were not still productive, then I might agree with the other analysis, but i am quite sure that it is a part of Norwegian speakers' performance, rather than competence.

[Miekko]

His example is actually pretty good. s <> t is a regular shift in several words, as is i <> e in that position. That's why you in Finnish get vesi > veden > vett? .

Similarly, in Germanic, /g/ > /j/ is pretty common, and vowel shifts condition it a bit:
giva (/jivA/)
gav (/gAv/).
IMHO, the g/j shift is encoded in a different way. I think (producing) allophony is closer to the 'performance' level, while morphophonetic shifts are (originally performance-related stuff that has been lifted to the) competence level.

True. It is difficult to discern allophones from obsolete morphophonetic patterns. I would agree with you that the allophony is characterised by being still productive, and thus on the performance level, while the latter is not.

k > tS and g > j is productive imd, but I would claim that it is exclusively morphophonetic.

[Nae]

As a general comment, what you are suggesting (sarcastically or not) for Finnish is exactly what English and French have done. In both languages, you can reconstruct quite well the history of phonetic changes by looking at the vagaries of orthography.

As an almost exact replica of the Finnish vesi < *vete situation you have the English and French words spelled, in both cases <nation>, and pronounced /'neiSn/ and /na'sj?/, respectively.

Had Finnish begun to be written a thousand years before it did, it would not be surprising if it spelled /vesi/ as <vete>.

I certainly hope not that the phonemic analysis of ['neiʃn] is /nation/!

Rhetorics aside, what I did was suggest a phonemic analysis, which is distinct from orthographic analysis and what Radagast is suggesting; that, even though /gi/ has merged with /ji/, some of the /ji/s are still phonemically distinct from the other /ji/s by being pure allophones of /gi/... Which I don't really agree with.

[Radagast]

I certainly hope not that the phonemic analysis of ['neiʃn] is /nation/!

Under different circumstances it could be argued that it is.

*Warning - hypothetical example ahead*

If for example we were to posit a [-tion]suffix for english that were the same in words such as bas-tion, ques-tion and na-tion (I know this is not the case but please bear with the hypothetical example) then we would have to propose two differet phonemic structures for the same suffix depending on the phonological enviroment or we could make a rule that -tion is realised as [ :sh on] in certain enviroments. If this were the case I'd advocate the second (Similar cases are in fact very common)

*hypothetical example finished*

Phoneme analysis is not an exact science. There is not one single way to understand a phoneme system, there are different ways, and depending on which arguments one wishes to weigh over others different interpretations can be chosen. There is no need for a phoneme system to be close to the actual pronunciation of a language - the level of phonetics and phonemics are separate, the first being the level of articulation and the second being an abstract structural level dealing with "the minimal elements that cause a change in meaning".

[gsandi]

As a general comment, what you are suggesting (sarcastically or not) for Finnish is exactly what English and French have done. In both languages, you can reconstruct quite well the history of phonetic changes by looking at the vagaries of orthography.

As an almost exact replica of the Finnish vesi < *vete situation you have the English and French words spelled, in both cases <nation>, and pronounced /'neiSn/ and /na'sj?/, respectively.

Had Finnish begun to be written a thousand years before it did, it would not be surprising if it spelled /vesi/ as <vete>.

I certainly hope not that the phonemic analysis of ['neiʃn] is /nation/!

That is indeed my recollection of Chomsky & Halle's analysis - although they would not have called it a phonemic analysis, but something underlying no doubt. (Sorry, I can't help making digs at Chomsky...)

Basically, stressed /a/ in an open syllable went predictably to /ei/ in words of two syllables, but not in words of three syllables (as in national). And the consonant cluster -sj-, which is how nation had been pronounced in Middle English, became /-S-/ in a change that is hardly unusual. (The <t> was just a Latinate spelling for /s/ in the ending -tion, an ending restricted to loanwords from Latin. Words with that ending that developed naturally from Latin to French voiced the consonant, as in potionem > poison).

[Xonen]

Nope. I disagree. That would mean that you would have to phonematise the word "to give" with two different phonemes depending on the conjugation, that would be really opaque in my opinion. It would mean that "give" would be phonemically /ji/ but gave would be phonemically /ga/.

What exactly is the problem with a word changing phonemes in its different forms? To take the Finnish word vesi again, the phonemes of the stem change from /vesi/ to /vete/ when a case ending is added (or even to /vede/ in some cases because of consonant gradation, but that's beside the point). There is no way you can explain that as allophonic variation in modern Finnish.

That being said, I do sort of agree with your argument about whether or not the sound change is still productive. Still, I'm not sure I'd count a phone as being simultaneously the standard realization of one phoneme and a rare allophone of another, but OTOH, I'm certainly not qualified to tell other people what's a correct way of making a linguistic analysis and what's not? Anyway, as has been said several times before, this is not the most exact of sciences, so couldn't this just be thought of as a matter of taste?

[Radagast]

It's is a matter of taste and arguments. There is of course nothing wrong with forms with different phonemes in them, but one thing is one suppletive form that can be explained diachronically and another thing is all forms containing a particular underlying element. Furthermore in an alternation such as /ji/ \ /ga/ it would be impossible to even see that the words are related, and you would have no way to understand the ablaut or any other phonological rule.

I don't think that it is crazy Chomskyanism to talk about underlying forms when it comes to phonemisation. To me establishing phonemes is only a tool that helps to understand phonological processes of a language. Maintaining "/ji/ \ /ga/" and the like seems to me to make it more opaque.

But it is not wrong to do it differently as long as you know which arguments lead you to chosing a specific interpretation.