The Language Log Dinosaur (as I like to think of him) makes the interesting point that 'no natural language uses the "blowing a raspberry" fart noise sound as a phoneme.' It's worth pondering why not -- for although it may be a noise too laborious to form (poking out tongue, coordinating the labial, getting the breathing right) to be able to fit easily into the flow of normal discourse, it stands very well on its own. Which is to say: 'It is un-["blowing a raspberry" fart noise sound]-believable' doesn't flow well enough to be selected for communication (unlike 'un-fucking-believable'), nevertheless 'My opinion of that? ["blowing a raspberry" fart noise sound]. That's my opinion' would be a completely ordinary piece of expression.
So, ["blowing a raspberry" fart noise sound] is a part of speech. But wait, given that it occurs in speech (like 'I' and 'Mm!'), in what way is this not a phoneme?
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5 comments:
imo it's not a phoneme because it doesn't contrast with other sounds to form minimal pairs, and because it has an extremely limited distribution - it doesn't occur in words. Even the glottal stop has more of a phonemic status because it occurs in words like "uh-uh" (meaning no) and "mm mm" (also meaning no).
Goofy: interesting (thanks for the explanation) ... but: you've encountered Sylvester the Cat, right? The raspberry sound folded into "Sufferin' succotash!" is surely phonemic. Isn't it?
It comes down to what a phoneme is, and opinions differ. I'm no expert, but imo a) either it's a phoneme but only in the language of one speaker (that is, Sylvester's phonemic inventory has this sound and no phoneme /s/), or b) it's the phonetic realization of the phoneme /s/ in Sylvester's speech (in other words, it's a peculiarity of Sylvester speech that he pronounces /s/ like that). I lean towards the latter, because I (and I assume most people) interpret his "sufferin' succotash" as containing /s/, not this other sound.
It's a very cool example you've found and maybe an expert would have more to say about it.
To put it another way: from one point of view, it's a phoneme in Sylvester's dialect, but it's a dialect of one speaker. From another point of view, it's not a phoneme, it's just how he pronounces /s/. You know he's saying "sufferin' succotash", not "["blowing a raspberry" fart noise sound]ufferin' ["blowing a raspberry" fart noise sound]uccotash".
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