- Language, New York 1933, 385.
- A bibliography will be found in A. G. Haudricourt & A. G. Juilland, Essai pour une histoire structurale du phonétisme français, Paris 1949, 119–120; see, ibid., ix–xiv and 1–13. Later contributions will be cited in the course of this paper.
- Cours de linguistique générale, Paris 1931, 162.
- Language, Its Nature, Development, and, Origin, London 1922, 263.
- As presented in A. Martinet, Description phonologique du parler franco-provençal d'Hauteville (Savoie), Revue de linguistique romane 15.1–86; see, in particular, 2–3.
- Cf. F. M. Rogers, Insular Portuguese Pronunciation: Porto Santo and Eastern Azores, Hispanic Review 16.1–32, in particular 13.
- The problem is dealt with by Haudricourt-Juilland, op. cit., 100–113.
- Lip-rounding, which distinguishes/ǣ/from/ε̃/, is an unstable feature in the case of such very open articulations. The same is true of course for /5/ which we might expect to merge with /ã/in forms of speech where /ǣ/ merges with/ε̃/(actually [ǣ]). But the functional yield of the /5/—/ã/opposition is very high in French, and the merger is only attested in such northern Gallo-Romance dialects (and the corresponding local forms of Standard French) as have kept en phonemically distinct from an so that the frequency of/ã/(= an) is much lower than in the standard language.
- Cf. A. Martinet, La prononciation du français contemporain, Paris, 1945, 170–173.
- Ibid., 94–109.
- The language affords no easy solution by means of composition, such as exists in English: boy friend, girlfriend; most French speakers will pronounce the -e of amie, which results in a phonemically exceptional combination, phonetically [aІmiІə] or [a#1030;mi#1030;œ].
- As for instance in German.
- Roman Jakobson was the first scholar to advocate such a reduction: see Proceedings of the Third Intern. Congress of Phon. Sciences, Ghent 1939, 34–41, and Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze, Språkvetenskapliga sällskapets förhandlingar 1940–1942, Uppsala 1941, 52–77. It was applied by J. P. Soffietti in his Phonemic Analysis of the Word in Turinese, New York 1949, and by Roman Jakobson and J. Lotz in Notes on the French Phonemic Pattern, Word 5.151–158. The latest exposition of the procedure is to be found in Preliminaries to Speech Analysis, The Distinctive Features and their Correlates, Technical Report No. 13, January 1952, Acoustics Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by Roman Jakobson, C. G. M. Fant, and M. Halle.
- In such a case, it would of course be redundant to state that such an opposition as /š/-/k/ is one of hush-friction vs. velarity-plosion, and descriptive economy is achieved by reducing it to friction vs. plosion (or continuant vs. interrupted; cf. Preliminaries to Speech Analysis, 6 and 21) because the hush—velarity opposition can thus be eliminated. But it should be clear that descriptive economy is achieved here through blurring the actual synchronic relationship between two phonemic units. Descriptive economy does not necessarily do full justice to functional and structural reality.
- The term is found in K. L. Pike's Phonemics, Ann Arbor 1947, 117b.
- Probably used for the first time by this author in La phonologie synchronique et diachronique, Conférences de l'Institut de linguistique de l'Université de Paris (1938) 6.53.
- See Alarcos Llorach, Fonología española, Madrid 1950, 80–81.
- For a detailed analysis of a clear case of pattern attraction, see A. Martinet, The Unvoicing of Old Spanish Sibilants, Romance Philology 5.139. In his pioneering article Phonetic and Phonemic Change, Language 12.15–22, A. A. Hill uses the term ‘phonemic attraction’ for a different phenomenon resulting in partial or total phonemic confusion; cf. 21.
- Description phonologique… 36 and 38.
- Cf., ibid., what is said, pp. 44 and 56, about a tendency toward making ě the phonemic equivalent of zero.
- See The Unvoicing of Old Spanish Sibilants, 135–136, 140–141.
- See Vicente García de Diego, Gramática histórica española, Madrid 1951, 103.
- For a general survey of the restrictions imposed upon the expansion of correlations by the inertia and assymetry of speech organs, see A. Martinet, Rôle de la corrélation dans la phonologie diachronique, TCLP 8.273–288.
- Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort, Cambridge, Mass., 1949, 56–133.
- La double articulation linguistique, TCLC 5.34.
- See Haudricourt-Juilland, 17–58, 98–113.
- Cf. Henrik Abraham, Etudes phonétiques sur les tendances évolutives des occlusives germaniques, Aarhus 1949, 108.
- Cf., e.g. A. Martinet, Some Problems of Italic Consonantism, Word 6.35–41.
- Cf. The Unvoicing of Old Spanish Sibilants, generally, and 152–156 in particular.
- See, e.g. N. S. Trubetzkoy, Grundzüge der Phonologie, Prague 1939, 180, or Principes de phonologie, Paris 1949, 215.
- See J. Marouzeau, Quelques aspect du relief dans l'énoncé, Le français moderne 13.165–68, with references to former contributions by the same author.
- It is clear of course that the energy with which stressed syllables are pronounced varies greatly from one language to another. Stress is, for instance, decidedly weaker in Spanish than in Italian, and probably weaker in standard Italian than in standard German. Some languages, like German, show close contact of stressed short vowels and following consonants; others have loose contact in such cases. When Bloomfield writes, Language, 385: “many languages with strong word stress do not weaken the unstressed vowels” and cites among them Italian, Spanish, Czech, and Polish, he obviously wants to convince his readers that stress as such can not be held entirely responsible for vowel blurring. But his examples do not carry conviction: neither Czech nor Polish accent can be said to be particularly energetic; in standard Castilian, accent is uncommonly weak. In such matters, it is particularly important to distinguish between the successive stages of the same language. It is commonly assumed that ‘Germanic accent’ is vowel-blurring. But it remains to be proved that, e.g. in contemporary English and German, absence of stress is actually conducive to the blurring of vocalic distinctions. For Standard German, at least, this seems highly doubtful.
- See F. Falc'hun, Le système eonsonantique du breton, Rennes 1951, 63–65.
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