Thursday, September 14, 2017
Diamond in the hooeypot
A column by Phillip Friedman in the March 55 issue of Aberree contains one diamond of uniquely clear understanding hidden in a monstrous slagpile of hyperhooey.
Friedman managed to misunderstand language even more severely than professional linguists do, which is a considerable achievement.
I won't bother to show or transcribe the hyperhooey, but here's the diamond:
The vowels, the mother letters, give birth to the consonants. ... Vowels are the soul, consonants are the soulmates. This is literally true at the level of acoustics and perception. Consonants are not separable entities in the waveform. The segments that we're accustomed to marking as consonants are either shapings of the vowel or brief pauses in the vowel.
Friedman notes that the Biblical languages, which developed into modern Arabic and Hebrew, formed the habit of writing only the consonants because the semantic units of those languages are centered on the consonants. Morphemes were prefixed or suffixed, and the internal vowels changed to match the affixes. In fact this is only a difference of degree from other languages; all vowels and all consonants adjust to match their surroundings, and our perception is based on a long sliding temporal window that includes several syllables.
The syllable is the most basic unit, and it's recognized as such in many writing systems from Korean to Cherokee.
No writing system adequately accounts for the constant adjustment, except for "illiterate" "uneducated" writers. "Illiteracy" has been partly formalized in the spelling of Haitian French and some other pidgins and creoles.
The vowels, the mother letters, give birth to the consonants. ... Vowels are the soul, consonants are the soulmates. This is literally true at the level of acoustics and perception. Consonants are not separable entities in the waveform. The segments that we're accustomed to marking as consonants are either shapings of the vowel or brief pauses in the vowel.
Friedman notes that the Biblical languages, which developed into modern Arabic and Hebrew, formed the habit of writing only the consonants because the semantic units of those languages are centered on the consonants. Morphemes were prefixed or suffixed, and the internal vowels changed to match the affixes. In fact this is only a difference of degree from other languages; all vowels and all consonants adjust to match their surroundings, and our perception is based on a long sliding temporal window that includes several syllables.
The syllable is the most basic unit, and it's recognized as such in many writing systems from Korean to Cherokee.
No writing system adequately accounts for the constant adjustment, except for "illiterate" "uneducated" writers. "Illiteracy" has been partly formalized in the spelling of Haitian French and some other pidgins and creoles.Labels: Aberree, Language update
¶ 10:15 AM
