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some little proofreading

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sorrel 2024-02-07 15:10:32 -05:00
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(hgroup
(h3 "phonemes")
(p (em "what even are they?")))
(p "as just stated a phoneme is the basic articulatory and perceptual unit of a language. there's , is non-atomic. a phoneme can be decomposed into constituent features and minimal pairs of phonemes can be shown to be distinct only in their realization of one feature. by way of example, the [b] in the word 'shabby' and the [m] in the word 'shammy' differ only in that the [m] is pronounced with air passing through the nasal cavity. the feature [+/- nasal] is therefore taken to be a salient feature in english phonology")
(p "all well and good, but things start to get tricky when we start defining features. firstly, there is no single agreed upon set of features by which to analyze all languages of a given modality. there's broad agreement that features exist and many proposed features are uncontroversial, yet even linguists analyzing the same language can disagree upon featural details. vowels in particular are quite slippery to analyze, with [+/- back], [+/- close], [+/- front], [+/- low], [+/- high], [+/- tongue root retracted], [+/- rounded] among the features present in different systems. there are also some linguists who, relying on auditory analysis, analyze vowels primarily via formant analysis. (formants are measures of what is sometimes referred to as 'resonance' or 'vowel color' -- they are the pitches above the fundamental frequency with the greatest relative amplitude.) it is this amateur crank's opinion that because articulation and perception are subject to different constraints and pressures, what is deemed a feature can elide a relationship between speach actor and interlocutor. thankfully, should latl allow for user definition of features and their phonemes, it can remain agnostic to the hairy work of actual linguistics")
(p "users should be able to define their own phonetic feature sets and use those to compose their phonemes. (i'm going to sneak in the undefended assertion here that users should be able to use "(em "other users'") " definitions as well. forgive me.) if you're reading this and are familiar with linguistics, you might now be wondering about the curious case of place of articulation. should place features be treated as hierarchichal -- should [coronal] place of articulation be required for [+/- anterior] feature of the crown of the tongue? if so, how are coarticulations like [tʷ] or [k͡p] to be expressed in featural terms? here again, latl will allow for the definition of hierarchichal features and make no assumptions about their use")
(p "as just stated a phoneme is the basic articulatory and perceptual unit of a language. there's a fairly wide consensus amongst linguists that, despite being the minimal constituent needed to represent meaning in language, phonemes are ") (strong "not atomic.") " a phoneme can be decomposed into constituent features and minimal pairs of phonemes can be shown to be distinct only in their realization of one feature. by way of example, the [b] in the word 'shabby' and the [m] in the word 'shammy' differ only in that the [m] is pronounced with air passing through the nasal cavity. the feature [+/- nasal] is therefore taken to be a salient feature in english phonology")
(p "all well and good, but things start to get tricky when we start defining features. firstly, there is no single agreed upon set of features by which to analyze all languages of a given modality. as stated, there's broad agreement that phonetic features exist and many proposed features are uncontroversial, yet even linguists analyzing the same language can disagree upon featural details. vowels in particular are quite slippery to analyze, with [+/- back], [+/- close], [+/- front], [+/- low], [+/- high], [+/- tongue root retracted], [+/- rounded] among the features present in different systems. there are also some linguists who, relying on auditory analysis, analyze vowels primarily via formant analysis. (formants are measures of what is sometimes referred to as 'resonance' or 'vowel color' -- they are the pitches above the fundamental frequency with the greatest relative amplitude.) it is this amateur crank's opinion that because articulation and perception are subject to different constraints and pressures, what is deemed a feature can elide a relationship between speach actor and interlocutor. thankfully, should latl allow for user definition of features and their phonemes, it can remain agnostic to the hairy work of actual linguistics")
(p "users should therefore be able to define their own phonetic feature sets and use those to compose their phonemes. (i'm going to sneak in the undefended assertion here that users should be able to use "(em "other users'") " definitions as well. forgive me.) if you're reading this and are familiar with linguistics, you might now be wondering about the curious case of place of articulation. should place features be treated as hierarchichal -- should [coronal] place of articulation be required for [+/- anterior] feature of the crown of the tongue? if so, how are coarticulations like [tʷ] or [k͡p] to be expressed in featural terms? here again, latl will allow for the definition of hierarchichal features and make no assumptions about their use")
(p "yet another problem is hiding in the view i've thus provided of phonological features. there is a wide (but not universal) belief that distinctive features in phonology are inherently binary. this is convenient from a computational perspective, but may not be descriptive of real language. firstly, it is possible to analyze [coronal] in the previous paragraph as a unary feature relevant to place of articulation. more distressingly, a proposed feature set that includes [+/- high] and [+/- low] predicts the nonsense value set: {[+ high] [+ low]}. one approach to this conundrum is to propose a feature scale [-1/0/1 height]. this is far from a settled matter, but latl should prioritize a user's ability to define such feature scales over implementation considerations or linguistic debate")
(p "it's been a few paragraphs without any mention of sign languages, so it is worth gesturing at how their phonological features relate to these considerations to ensure latl doesn't start it's life with a modality bias. sign languages are widely understood to have phonological systems that are featural. as is the case with spoken languages, specifics of feature sets vary based on language and researcher. features can be salient to a language and form minimal pairs ie [+/- palm prone] is one way of reading the difference between the ASL fingerspelling signs for /p/ and /k/. research suggests that there is a high degree of hierarchichal complexity in the phonological features of sign languages, which maps very neatly to the place of articulation problem in spoken languages. features related to handshape, such as [+/- flex] or [+/- extension] only make sense in regards to selected fingers. i have not seen any research about featural scales in sign languages, but it would be unsurprising to analogize the same issues arising from nonsense combinations of binary features")
(p "let's zoom back out to phonemes for a moment to add another wrinkle to the featural representation. the notion (unconscious or not) a speaker of a language has for what constitutes a single sound is understood to be a 'bundle' of features, but not every feature holds the same importance in every environment. by way of example, the /t/ phoneme in my dialect of english can be realized in a number of different ways depending on its location. it can be aspirated [tʰɑk] with [+ spread glottis] (or [+ delayed onset] if you prefer an auditory approach) in 'tock' without aspiration [stɑk] [- spread glottis] in 'stock' or as a flap [ˈbʌ.ɾək] in 'buttock'. this flap differs from the others at least in having [+ sonorant] and [+ voice], but retaining [coronal] [+ anterior]. yet, if i heard *[ɾɑk] in isolation, i would assume the speaker was referring to a stone or a genre of music. this situation is called allophony and latl must maintain a way to treat phonemes like /t/ as salient bundles of features distinct from the more discrete phones [tʰ], [t], [ɾ] whose features are more specified. once again, we see a similar situation with regards the ASL phoneme, /e handshape/ which has allophonic representations [+ open aperture] (the unmarked /e/ familiar in the fingerspelled alphabet) and [- open aperture] in certain environments")
(p "warning! that [r] in my dialect of english, is an allophone of two different phonemes! the realization of the words /bæt.ər/ and /bæd.ər/ ('batter' and 'badder') is the same: [bæɾ.ɚ]. this 'under-specification' of not unique to my dialect of english and some linguists propose an archiphoneme /D/ which is a kind of set of /t/ and /d/ to account for this. in this view 'batter' and 'badder' are orthographically distinct, but phonemically both /bæD.ər/. is this 'really' what is going on? i'm not qualified to say, but i am confident that latl can be made to handle this situation without straining our abstratctions too much")
(p "it's been a few paragraphs without any mention of sign languages, so it is worth gesturing at how their phonological features relate to these considerations to ensure latl doesn't start it's life with a modality bias. sign languages are widely understood to have phonological systems that are featural. as is the case with spoken languages, specifics of feature sets vary based on language and researcher. features can be salient to a language and form minimal pairs ie [+/- palm prone] is one way of reading the difference between the ASL fingerspelling signs for /p/ and /k/. research suggests that there is a high degree of hierarchichal complexity in the phonological features of sign languages, which maps very neatly to the place of articulation problem in spoken languages. features related to handshape, such as [+/- flex] or [+/- extension] only make sense in regards to selected fingers. i have not seen any research about featural scales in sign languages, but it would be unsurprising to analogize the same issues arising from nonsense combinations of binary features") ;; TODO add some ASL images (maybe sound for some of the english bits?
(p "let's zoom back out to phonemes for a moment to add another wrinkle to the featural representation. the notion (unconscious or not) a speaker of a language has for what constitutes a single sound is understood to be a 'bundle' of features, but not every feature holds the same importance in every environment. by way of example, the /t/ phoneme in my dialect of english can be realized in a number of different ways depending on its location. it can be aspirated [tʰɑk] with [+ spread glottis] (or [+ delayed onset] if you prefer an auditory approach) in 'tock', without aspiration [stɑk] [- spread glottis] in 'stock', or as a flap [ˈbʌ.ɾək] in 'buttock'. this flap differs from the others at least in having [+ sonorant] and [+ voice], but retaining [coronal] [+ anterior]. yet, if i heard *[ɾɑk] in isolation, i would assume the speaker was referring to a stone or a genre of music. this situation is called allophony and latl must maintain a way to treat phonemes like /t/ as salient bundles of features distinct from the more discrete phones [tʰ], [t], [ɾ] whose features are more specified. once again, we see a similar situation with regards the ASL phoneme, /e handshape/ which has allophonic representations [+ open aperture] (the unmarked /e/ familiar in the fingerspelled alphabet) and [- open aperture] in certain environments")
(p "warning! that [r] in my dialect of english, is an allophone of two different phonemes! the realization of the words /bæt.ər/ and /bæd.ər/ ('batter' and 'badder') is the same: [bæɾ.ɚ]. this 'under-specification' of not unique to my dialect of english and some linguists propose an archiphoneme /D/ which is a kind of set of /t/ and /d/ to account for this. in this view 'batter' and 'badder' are orthographically distinct, but phonemically both /bæD.ər/. is this 'really' what is going on? i'm not qualified to say, but i am confident that latl can be made to handle this situation without straining our abstractions too much")
(p "to recap thus far, we have phonemes, which for the purpose of latl are bundles of features of some value. features may be defined by the user of latl into feature systems, whereby they are usually but not always binary and may each have a dependency on another feature in the system. phonemes may have features of varying saliency allowing for allophony. these allophones are phones whose features are slightly different but retain the salient features of their phoneme, whether that phoneme is specified or an underspecified archiphoneme that could represent multiple phonemes. as an additional item, it is helpful to have a shorthand to refer to phonemes and their allophones, ie "(code "/t/") ", "(code "[tʰ]") ", " (code "[t]") ", and " (code "[ɾ]") " or " (code "/D/"))
(p "an EBNF grammar (because grammars are fun!) of this relationship might be ")
(code "phoneme = positive-integer * phone { phoneme } ) ; (* a phoneme must be a set of phones and optional (archi-)phoneme *)" (br)