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Normally silent phonemes | ||
Tags: Phonetics | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6015 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 1 of 13 26 August 2010 at 11:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
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What languages do you know that have phonemes that are normally not pronounced?
The classic example is French, where final consonants are left unpronounced, except in liaison. Another great example is the ghost of N in Gaelic and Irish. The negative particle in Gaelic used to be "chan", but in most cases is now just "cha". The negative particle causes an initial mutation, but the ghost of the N blocks the lenition of dental consonants (DNTL, appropriately enough!) just as a pronounced N would. In both cases, the native speaker handles these exceptional cases so easily that they must have the "silent" sound in their phoneme map of the language. The consequences for teaching and learning are often ignored. How do you develop a phoneme map that includes a "silent" sound?!? What other languages do you know that have silent phonemes and what are their peculiarities. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6015 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 2 of 13 26 August 2010 at 11:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Another thing occurs to me.
The feminine -e, is it a phoneme? Is it a silent phoneme when added to a masculine form with a final vowel, or is it really just something they do in writing? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5324 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 3 of 13 27 August 2010 at 8:14am | IP Logged | |||||
IMHO, your examples are not phonemes but merely silent letters, because for a sound to be considered a phoneme it actually has to be heard. As for other examples, there's of course the silent "h" in French and Spanish. It's also silent in German after most long vowels, if it's followed by another consonant, e.g., "Sahne", "Naht" etc. And in Arabic the "a" of the definite article "al" loses its sound if the preceding word ends in a vowel other than a. E.g. al-bayt (the house), but fi-l-bayt (in the house). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6707 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 13 27 August 2010 at 10:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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A lot of phonemes in Danish are not pronounced in daily speech, but if we speak slowly and clearly they will be pronounced. For instance we normally pronounce the greeting "goddag" as /goda/, but we can choose to say /goð d:ai/* so the 'silent' phonemes are definitely there in some way. This is not rule-bound as the French liaison, but used freely as a mean of expression or for practical purposes - for instance when speaking to other Scandinavians.
*(sorry, but I haven't bothered to learn IPA - the last 'j' is like a weak English /ee/, and the /a/ is slightly longer than usually) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6015 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 5 of 13 27 August 2010 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
The notion of a silently-realised phoneme is fairly well accepted, and it all arose (IIRC) from the analysis of French liaison. The "s" in "vous" is not a silent letter, because it is pronounced in (eg) "vous êtes" and "vous allez", but not in a lot of other places. So when linguists were faced with a sound that is sometimes there and sometimes not, they had to ask themselves: is this the insertion of an extra phoneme, or is it one phoneme that is sometimes realised as a sound and sometimes realised as zero? Mainstream thought is the latter, as liaison can occur with many words in many grammatical positions. If the sound was inserted grammatically, it would most likely regularise down to one or two sounds, but almost all consonants can occur in liaison. So they concluded that the sound must be part of the basic word in the speaker's mind, even if you can't always hear it -- so it must be a single phoneme that is sometimes not pronounced. Having reached that conclusion with French, suddently it made life a lot easier in other languages. Now Gaelic again. The word "chan" occurs rarely -- mostly it is just "cha", but "cha" still acts as though there is an N at the end, blocking certain mutations. The form "chan" occurs before vowels, and the N is pronounced. So far, so similar to French liaison. But unlike French, Gaelic has mutation, and "cha"/"chan" triggers a softening of the first consonant in the following word. This softening, call lenition, affects B,C,D,F,G,P,S and T, and in some dialects L, N and R. But after "cha" , D, N, T and L are never lenited. Why? An N at the end of a word blocks lenition of DNTL. So there must be an unpronounced N in "cha" -- we can see its "shadow" on the next word. So there must be such a thing as a silent phoneme. If we insist that phonemes are only things that can be heard, then the term "phoneme" becomes uselessly abstract -- it reflects only the outside world, not the internal representation of the language used by speakers of the language, and it is the internal model which is the best definition of a language, even if it cannot be measured as accurately as the external realisation. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6015 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 6 of 13 27 August 2010 at 2:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
I nearly said "ah, but that's elision" and then I realised that elision is actually the same process. It seems so obvious now that you've pointed it out....
Good guess -- put the dots after the long vowel, and yes, "j" is the symbol you're looking for, so /goðda:j/. (Strictly, the dots should be little triangles, not a colon, but must people are happy using a colon when typing on the net.) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5302 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 7 of 13 27 August 2010 at 2:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
This is a rather peculiar way to put it. When we call |x| a phoneme of a language, we don't make the disctinction based on its function in grammar. If a grapheme like h in Spanish is always silent and does not have any further effects on pronunciation, then it is not a phoneme of the language. In French the feminine {e} is a grammatical morpheme, and for its phonetic representation certain phonological rules are applied before it is actually pronounced, for example "mute any final sound". An example like fr. vert vs verte shows that a sound (t here) can be mute or not, depending on the rule. That "mute" does not mean "does not exist" can be seen by the fact that the t is pronounced again as soon as the rule regarding finality does no longer apply. Sorry if this seems like nitpicking, but separating these levels can help to avoid some confusion, . I certainly agree that this conventional scheme to look at these problems does not solve all the problems, and the actual rules and examples may be much more interesting than the theoretical framework. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5385 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 8 of 13 27 August 2010 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
(forgive the weird IPA usage here; blame my computer) In a word like "grand" /grâ/, the feminine morpheme is "d" /grâd/, whereas the liaison morpheme is /t/ as in "le grand air" /grâtèr/. -e is a grapheme and occasionally an epenthetic vowel. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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