2012/2/9 Michael Everson <[email protected]>: > On 9 Feb 2012, at 13:49, srivas sinnathurai wrote: > >> Dear Michael, >> >> It is better if you do do some research before commenting. >> >> you say Tamil has 10 vowels. >> No Tamil has 5 basic PoA for generating vowels. > > Please learn what a phoneme is.
And not just phonemes. Because spoken languages alos use other phonetic features (even if they are not always constrasted semantically, but the only occur due to the paticular phonology of a language or one of its regional accents). For example, you'll want to learn about tones (and tonemes when they are represented in a phonetic notation), stress, length... As well as coarticulations (in IPA, some coarticulations were given specific symbols, but now they are preferably represented by their components, and a tie symbol above them). Coarticulation are typically found in European language with the letter "x", even if this letter is ambiguous and represents several phonetic realizations like "ks" or "gz" (in many languages, they are considered allophones, because they don't contrast, and they are chosen according to the phonology), plus some others which are simpler phonemes with a single articulation like "h" or "k". Then you'll want to add breath extensions (something that transforms, e.g., "p" into something like "p-h", still contrasting with the "pf" coarticulation. Depending on linguists, those breath extensions are not always considered as coarticulations (because the extra breath is not considered as a real articulation). Alphabets are built by trying to not just represent a particular phonetic, but a range of different realizations that are considered allophones and encompass various regional accents. They are a sort of "unification" of the phonetics at one time, but they also play a role to help mutual understanding with reading, using some common roots and a limited set of variants. For this reason, there's absolutely no language in the world that uses a pure phonetic transcription (except possibly some minority languages for which there's still no orthographic tradition or standard). This would not work. All alphabets use letters to represent a more or less wide set of allophones; then the languages continue to evolve (including in their phonology and distribution of dominant accents), so that the same letters are kept (to preserve semantic roots), even though they no longer are representing true allophones. At the same time, foreign sounds will be added to the set of allophones, and approximated by existing letters, without necessarily adding a letter to the alphabet. As long as this does not create confusion with too many homonyms, such approximations will remain valid and understandable. It will take much longer time for a language to accept foreign phonetic distinctions and include them as distinct phonemes as part of their phonology, even if today it seems easier to extend the alphabet with new borrowed letters or optional diacritics, used first by "purists" and linguistic theoricians. One good example (found in French) is the current development of the transcription of Japanese names using macrons to transcribe long vowels (French has lost the phonemic distinction of long and short vowels since long, but not Japanese, as well as many Asian languages) : there's still no agreement to use those macrons, because French words absolutely don't need it (short and long vowels are considered allophones as the length vary freely depending on each person or regioanl accents, or depending on context of use for the same semantic words, and thus, it is difficult for French natives to hear and pronounce a distinction between those allophones that only vary in length, tone or stress). But this does not mean that the number of letters in an alphabet shows the extent of distinctive phonemes : the orthography also uses distinctions using additional mute letters or diacritics (to break the usual contextual rule of transcription), as well as digrams or trigrams. Then the orthographic traditions to preserve the semantic roots that associate different words in the same family play a role in breaking the initial tie of the phonology (not the phonetics!) and the orthography (whever a language tends to preserve these roots is highly dependant of the language : for example, French preserves these roots much more than European Portuguese, which itself preserves them much more than Brazilian Portuguese and creole languages that have a very relaxed orthography more tied to the current local phonology than to the preservation of semantic roots).
