Page Text
________________
Phonetics and Phonemics in Historical
Linguistics-II
Phonetic distinctions often admit of gradations and a phone can be said to possess more or less of a particular phonetic feature. This makes a . clear-cut distinction between two phones often difficult and consequently a systematic and schematic statement becomes either impossible or uncertain. This is the basic reason for the uncertainty which attaches to the principle of phonetic similarity between sound segments. To the extent one invokes this principle in phonemic analysis, this indefiniteness is likely to find a place in the final result as well.
On the other hand, the phonemic distinctions always admit of a decision of the either or type. Two phones are either the same phoneme or are phonemically different. The question of more or less is either impossible or meaningless. This has the advantage of making a clear-cut and precise statement of the phonemic system of a language possible, and as shown by Trubetzkoy, dialect boundaries based on phonemic comparisons can be definite and clearly separated.
This insistence of phonemics on the systematic analysis of a language, however, produces some difficulties in historical linguistics, which aims at following the concrete changes in the history of a language. It is well known that the different phonetic changes which a language undergoes in the course of its development can be classified as either phonemic or non-phonemic. This means that some phonetic changes amount to phonemic change in a given language, while others do not and therefore remain as mere phonetic changes. Phonemics either takes no note of this latter type of change or cannot do so for lack of evidence to ascertain them. It is even suggested that as long as the phonetic changes do not produce any phonemic change, they are unimportant and linguistically irrelevant. Minute changes in the actual production of the phonemes in a given language are of no value for the
| SR No. | 006968 |
| Book Title | Amrita Collected Papers by A M Ghatage |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Jitendra B Shah |
| Publisher | Kasturbhai Lalbhai Smarak Nidhi Ahmedabad |
| Publication Year | |
| Total Pages | 530 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 10 MB |