Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!rutgers!ames!sdcsvax!nosc!humu!uhccux!lee From: lee@uhccux.UUCP (Greg Lee) Newsgroups: sci.lang,comp.std.internat Subject: Re: generalised alphabets Message-ID: <774@uhccux.UUCP> Date: Wed, 2-Sep-87 11:04:43 EDT Article-I.D.: uhccux.774 Posted: Wed Sep 2 11:04:43 1987 Date-Received: Sat, 5-Sep-87 06:21:30 EDT References: <15488@mordor.s1.gov> <1209@pdn.UUCP> <1296@houdi.UUCP> <1222@pdn.UUCP> <1301@houdi.UUCP> Reply-To: lee@uhccux.UUCP (Greg Lee) Organization: U. of Hawaii, Manoa (Honolulu) Lines: 36 Xref: mnetor sci.lang:1281 comp.std.internat:199 32 bits sounds about right to me for characterizing all the sounds of human languages. This is somewhat greater than the number of features proposed in The Sound Pattern of English, Chomsky and Halle, 1968. The feature system proposed there is a standard in linguistics. Since 1968 there have been many modifications proposed to this system, but none that would change the total of features greatly. The features have to do with positions and movements of the organs of articulation. Such a system of representation would be appropriate if one wished to characterize sounds sufficiently well so as to distinguish the pronunciations of different words for any language, homonyms aside, and also the dialect of the speaker, and something of the style of speech. One could not expect to represent sound well enough to preserve information about sex, age, or, e.g. presence of sinus infection. For the most part, the features in this system are binary-valued. An exception is the stress feature, but nowadays a commonly held position is that stress is more appropriately represented by attributing a structure to a string of sounds. So perhaps this is not a problem. It was also held by Chomsky and Halle that other features should have scalar values for detailed representations, but no grounds were given, and I don't believe it. However there are some arguments for scalar values in the literature. It's hard to see any present application outside linguistics for a text-processing system based on language-universal sound representation, since one doesn't find texts already represented this way, and there are no devices available to transcribe speech into such representations. The work that is being done on automatic transcription is, so far as I know, parochial and essentially unprincipled. * Greg Lee * U.S. mail: 562 Moore Hall, Dept. of Linguistics * University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI 96822 * UUCP: {ihnp4,seismo,ucbvax,dcdwest}!sdcsvax!nosc!uhccux!lee * ARPA: uhccux!lee@bass.nosc.MIL