zompist bboard

Is there a list or resource of common allophones?

If not, it might be a useful project for board members to get together and make one for the L&L museum.

[T] being an allophone of /t/
[D] being an allophone of /d/

I can't even grok how you'd organise such a thing, given that allophony is a many-to-many relationship.

I can think of an easy, if perhaps ugly way. Simply use an entry for a phoneme, say /t/. Then, following that entry list the allophones and in what context they appear. Perhaps organized as allophones which are nasal, stop, fricative, affricative, etc.

Best way of organizing it:

a table of places and manners of articulation. A really blunt stick to point at it with that won't point at less than maybe a dozen cells at a time.

2+3 clusivity wrote:I can think of an easy, if perhaps ugly way. Simply use an entry for a phoneme, say /t/. Then, following that entry list the allophones and in what context they appear. Perhaps organized as allophones which are nasal, stop, fricative, affricative, etc.

The flaw in this is that all phonemes are language-specific. Just because /t/ is used to indicate a particular phoneme in English and another in, say, Japanese or Abenaki doesn't mean they are the "same" phoneme in any meaningful sense. Phonemes only exist in the context of the phonological system according to which they are defined. /t/ is not the "same" phoneme when it contrasts with /ʔ/ or /d/ as when it doesn't, and this has implications of overriding importance for allophony.

linguoboy wrote:

2+3 clusivity wrote:I can think of an easy, if perhaps ugly way. Simply use an entry for a phoneme, say /t/. Then, following that entry list the allophones and in what context they appear. Perhaps organized as allophones which are nasal, stop, fricative, affricative, etc.

The flaw in this is that all phonemes are language-specific. Just because /t/ is used to indicate a particular phoneme in English and another in, say, Japanese or Abenaki doesn't mean they are the "same" phoneme in any meaningful sense. Phonemes only exist in the context of the phonological system according to which they are defined. /t/ is not the "same" phoneme when it contrasts with /ʔ/ or /d/ as when it doesn't, and this has implications of overriding importance for allophony.

Yea, a system with a single set of /p t k/ is going to have a lot more room for allophony than one with /p t tʃ k b d dʒ g pʰ tʰ tʃʰ kʰ/, and if you're coming up with a list of common allophones that's intended to you be useful, it will need to take that into account. And on top of that it's interpretation-dependent. If one set of stops is aspirated, and another is sometimes plain and sometimes voiced, is it /pʰ p/ or /pʰ b/ (or just /p b/)? What are the basics of the English system? (You could probably make a case that /ˀp p/ is more accurate than traditional /p b/, but where does that leave us for finding allophones?). Does Spanish have voiced stops or voiced fricatives? And when coming up with allophones, are we parsing Irish /tʲ/ with other /tʲ/, or with the broader group of /tʃ/? Maybe both? And that reminds me, we should distinguish between at least some of the two-dozen different sounds all called /s/, and probably some of the two dozen called /ʃ/, and the dozen or so called /ʂ/. Etc, etc, etc.

vokzhen wrote:And when coming up with allophones, are we parsing Irish /tʲ/ with other /tʲ/, or with the broader group of /tʃ/? Maybe both?

/tʲ/, surely, given that AFAIK they are only realised [tʃ] by non-native speakers.

In addition to everything vokzhen said, ease of reproduction is an important factor in choosing phonemic representation. This is clearly evident in, for instance, American Structuralist notation, which was designed to be typed on a manual typewriter (since most of its proponents were field linguists without access to IPA-compliant typefaces). You really can't assume you know what any given symbol represents without reading the associated text.

Some examples:

/h/ (American English, Smith-Trager)
/e/ (Korean, Martin)
/ɵ/ (Irish, Ó Siadhail)
/ă/ (Middle Chinese, Pulleyblank)

Anyone want to take a guess what these represent without consulting the relevant works?