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Logic and philology: incommensurability of descriptions of one-vowel systems1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Alexis Manaster Ramer  and
Belinda J. Bicknell
Alexis Manaster Ramer
Affiliation:
Computer Science Department, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202, USA. E-mail:amr@cs.wayne.edu
Belinda J. Bicknell
Affiliation:
1392 Honey Run Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48103, USA.
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Extract

Our purpose is simple: to apply a rudimentary kind of logical analysis to the problem, which sometimes arises in linguistic typology and in comparative linguistics, of whether there are any languages with fewer than two vowels. The principal reason why this question has occupied the attention of linguists is probably the fact that Proto-Indo-European is sometimes said to have had only one vowel phoneme (see especially Hjelmslev (1936–7), Borgstrøm (1949, 1954) and Lehmann (1952), following Saussure (1879). Yet this was precisely one of the features of PIE reconstruction that Jakobson selected for attack on typological grounds, reasoning that ‘a conflict between the reconstructed state of a language and the general laws which typology discovers makes the reconstruction questionable’ (1958: 23).

Type
Notes and Discussion
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , March 1995 , pp. 149 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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