Re: buffer vowel

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

>For the English I speak there is a set of specified rules. For the
>English you speak there is a set of specified rules. Noone (who is sane)
>would deny that those sets of rules are different. But at the same
>time, the differences between them are sufficiently trivial for the
>scholar of english to in general ignore them and suppose the myriad
>englishes to be all alike.

"Specified" implies a "specifier" (aty least to me).  NO one has ever list
a complete specification on the rules of any one person's English, so far as
I know.  While I believe in a higher deity, I do not believe that He specified
the rules of English from on high.

In any event, if you mean "specific" rules, instead of "specified", I still
disagree.  In the case of phonology, I do NOT think that two people of
 sigificantly different dialects have rules that are trivially different.  Don
 Harlow
cites a few instances where different dialects of English proved sufficiently
mutually unintelligible to cause serious problems.  When my best friend's
wife first came here (from Bolton Lancashire), I couldn't understand more than
an occasional word she said (and I've heard Yorkshire dialects are even harder
for Americans to understand).

But even when the difference are NOT extreme, what we have are different
mappings of the phone space to different phonemes.  There are even different
numbers of phonemes in some different dialects of English, as with my wife
and I.  But English provides suffcient redundancy and people are skilled
enougfh at error recovery through context analysis that we are able to
figure things out.  Lojban has lower redundancy, but has a more solid
prescription on the number of phonemes and their correspondence to specific
letters in words of the language.  As such there SHOULD be a direct mapping
of phonemes in one dialect to phonemes in the other, even if the exact phone
space of each phoneme is slightly different.  I suspect that, unless a speaker
is intentionally being perverse in his choice of phoneme maps, that most
Lojbanists will find the differences in Lojban phonology to be far more
trivial than the differences between dialects of English.  Indeed, if
Ivan, Nick, Goran, and Colin, were able to converse in Lojban when they first
met, even given that they come from such different language backgrounds,
I think this confirms my statement.

Turning to syntax and semantics, i would contend that different varieties of
English are even less consistent as to rules.  I can more easily testify as
to Russian - i can talk fluently with 5 and 6 year olds, but cannot understand
mroe than a word or two fo adult Russian. Yet per Chomsky, the two populations
are speaking essentially teh same grammar.  But I think the kids can't process
the adult grammar all that much better than I can.  The adult grammar has
more sophisticated syntax, and complex semantics as well.

Likewise, different regsiters of English have substantially different grammars,
in my opinion.
The English that I write on the net is NOT the same language that I use in
conversation in my living room.  It isn't simply true that one is a subset
of the other.  There are things permitted in the spoken dialects that might
not be recognized in print (if only for lack of ability to emphasize for
resolution) - I can cite the joke about the 11 or so "that"s in a row, which
makes no sense in written English, but is quite clear in spoken English.
I might use "ain't", not to mention a few expletives in my spoken language
that I would not use in written Engish.  You can say that these differences
are "trivial", But I think otherwise - my daughter who has been a fluent
English speaker with no accent for 2 years has SUBSTANTIAL reading
comprehension problems because of the suddenly mrore complex syntax that she is
running into in 4th grade textbooks.

lojbab