Subject: Re: case-sensitivity and identifiers (was Re: Wide character implementation) From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 06:21:08 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3226112482576869@naggum.net> * Thomas Bushnell, BSG | Oh, ok. That's a good point; the term "phoneme" is ambiguous I think. | Tonal differences are sometimes phonemic and sometimes not, but I now | understand what you mean. Whether a tonal or length difference should be | officially phonemic is a matter style and not any real linguistics, as | far as I can tell. *sigh* My native language has tonemes. Yours does not. Trust me on this, OK? Go look it up if you doubt me. Tone is the musical tone with which you pronounce a phoneme, or more precisely, with the relative direction of the change of the tone throughout the word. > Consider the phonemes of the word "really". The toneme is the difference > in pronunciation between "Really?" and "Really." and "Really!". | Yeah, but there it's a matter of marking, which is different than tone. *sigh No, this is a tone difference. The rising tone at the end of a question is precisely this -- tone. One does not usually talk about tonemes when dealing with the changing meaning of a sentence, but it is the same idea. | A better example in English is between homographs like "conduct" (a noun, | stress on the first syllable) and "conduct" (a verb, stress on the second | syllable). No, that would be stress, not tone. I was trying to give you an example of what tone is, not how the same sequence of phonemes can have different meaning in differing ways. | Because stress is contextual, it's not normally counted as a phoneme. | Tone and length are not contextual, so I think those are usually counted | as phonemes. But (as I said above) I think this is a pretty gray area. No, it is not a grey area. It just does not apply to English. Study Norwegian or Thai. /// -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.