The Parasox of Representing Taiwanese Nasal Stops: Orthographic Caos in the Nineties

• Main Authors: Tung, Dyer Yuh-Ru, 董育儒
• Other Authors: Chen, Yung-Yu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 1993
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/73799061672162159494

碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 語言學系 === 81 === Phonetically similar sounds are considered as members of one phoneme, when they do not occur in the same sou d sequence, i. e., in complementary distribution -- or, if they do, the replacement of one with the other does not change the meaning. This a found its application in many transcriptional systems; the sequence of decision can be demonstrated as follows: if sounds are in complementary distribution, it would not be necessary to transcribe them as different phonemes. However, the strict adherence to the complementary distribution rule would cause certain kinds of orthographic problems in the stops of the Southern Min of Taiwan. This thesis tries some other viewpoints as the aforementioned phonemic reasoning to present six problem areas; they are (1) the phonological simplicity metric, (2) phonetic plausibility and allophony, (3) CLA vs. synchronic description, (4) native intuition, (5) language universals, (6) the idea of replacing Chinese logography with alphabetic systems, and (7) a viewpoint of historical linguistics. During the process of analyzing more than twelvesystems and identifying problems, we are led to delve deeper into the problems of representing Taiwanese nasal stops. Thus, following the concepts of syllable structure of Crystal (1969) and Gimson (1970), the alpha notation of Hyman (1975) and the distinctiveory of Chomsky-Halle (1968), we propose the utmost generalization phonological rule. We assume: applying this rule one can account for all the possible syllables in Taiwanese (including those that are non-existent).