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Next: Cooccurrence phenomena Up: Finding Phonemes Previous: Redundancy.

Elegance

Linguists try to keep the system simple and elegant. The simplest or most elegant system is the one preferred. B. Bloch and his insistence on long vowel in pa'd vs. pod. Not simple: would have made length PHONEMIC, and that would have ended us up with a skewed, imbalanced, asymmetrical system in the distribution of long/short vowels. ESCHEW OBFUSCATION.



Harold Schiffman
Fri Jan 17 09:48:04 EST 1997