Re: The word "evolution"

On Fri, 23 Sep 2005, "Iain" <iain_inkster@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> What I mean is:
>
> - In normal speech, the final vowel of Eloquent is always neutral
> (Correct?). Moreover, dictionaries label it as being a shwa.
> - However, in poetry I can rhyme it with non-neutral "spent", if I
> choose to, by lengthening the vowel.
> - I cannot, however, rhyme it with non-neutral "want" by doing the
> same.
> - The appearance to the lay thing such as myself is that there is some
> sort of dormant pronunciation with a non-neutral vowel, that falls
> within the range of validity and is somehow tied up with orthography,
> although that doesn't sound very scientific.
>
> What is the linguists' explanation for that? That probably clarifies
> what I meant when I asked whether the neutralness of the final vowel is
> something "circumstantial", rather than phonemic or "official".

Most, or possibly all, linguists believe that we store representations
of words, prefixes, suffixes, etc. in what they call an "underlying
form", but when we speak we apply various rules to transform the
underlying form into a "surface form", and then we articulate the
surface form with greater or lesser accuracy.

You are correct that the pronunciation is somehow tied up with
something, and that something is the "underlying form" studied by
phonology. The underlying form is thought of as a sequence of
"segments", which can be thought of as a sort of idealized alphabet of
sounds. (The correspondence to orthography can be really weak, for a
number of reasons. Supposedly some languages such as Spanish and
ancient Greek use spellings that are very good representations for
what is actually said, whereas very obviously English and French
don't.)

So it seems that you are observing that poetry, for you, allows rhyme
based on the underlying forms rather than on the surface forms, which
strikes me as odd but in fact plausible.

I qualified that as "for you", because the rules of poetry aren't
universal. Some poets use "eye rhyme", which I happen to think sucks.
Some cultures' poetry doesn't use rhyme at all; for example, Old
English used patterns of stressed, repeated word-initial sounds.

What you are suggesting would, IMO, make a good topic for a paper
in linguistics.


Terminological note: The study of the transformations is called
phonology, and the study of the articulation is called phonetics.

I have been sloppy with notation in this thread, using things like 't'
to represent a segment. Among linguists the habit is to use /t/ to
show a phonological form and [t] to show a phonetic transcription.

Also, the inventory of possible segments are represented by a system
known as the IPA, "International Phonetic Alphabet". There are
conventions for representing the IPA in ASCII so that Usenet
discussions can be precise, but I've never bothered learning those
conventions. But in a linguistics paper you'd expect to see IPA
symbols enclosed in // or [] to represent the various forms.

There are a number of models for how all this works, but the simplest
is the traditional notion that a lot of rules are applied sequentially.

For example, the construction of the plural "dogs" would go something
like this (except that I'm not representing the vowels with the
correct IPA symbols or ASCII equivalents).

Take /dog/ from the lexicon.

Apply a morphological rule to form the plural by adding /s/
to the end: /dogs/

Apply a rule that says word-final /s/ becomes voiced if it
follows a vowel or a voiced consonant: /dogz/

Similar rules would specify which syllables get stressed ("populate"
vs. "population"), which vowels get reduced to neutral sounds, what
gets contracted, etc.

--
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas

.

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