This book is intended to serve as a general introduction to the basic concepts of phonology. It is a brief survey of the developments in phonology from earlier times to the present. Contributions of different scholars in this field are summarized.
The introductory chapter sums up the development of the concept 'phoneme' and gives a brief introduction of the theoretical aspects of Prague phonology, Glossematics, Stratificational phonology and prosodic phonology.
In addition to the introductory chapter, this work includes four more chapters. Chapter Two makes a comparison of phoneme theory and theory of generative phonology. It examines how far the theory of GP differs from phoneme theory and its relative merits over the other.
The Third chapter is an exposition of the theory of transformational generative phonology as it is presented in chomsky and Halle's "The Sound Pattern of English". The basic principles of the theory are summarized.
Though my reading in generative phonology is not upto date, the fascination to read through Dr. T. Vasanthakumari's monograph on 'Progress of Phonology' was irresistible.
It is not a clear summary of the most prominent publications in the field. Nor is it a student introduction with illustration from Dravidian and other Indian languages. It is a compendium of these publications which are germinal to phonology.
The relationship of phonemes as a mental phenomena is aggressively explored now. Several of the theories of Noam Chomsky and those who followed him will be critically evaluated, when the brain connection is firmly established.
No doubt Dr.T. Vasanthakumari through this publícation has established that she is well grounded in phonemic theory in India.
Interest in pronunciation is much older than the pursuit of phonetics and phonology. Several centuries before Christ, Indian scholars were making a description of Sanskrit and achieving remarkable accuracy in articulatory phonetics. Since there was need to preserve certain rituals and orally transmitted religious texts coming from the Vedic period (1200-1000 BC), the oldest known stage of Sanskrit literature, great accuracy in pronunciation was expected. The articulatory descriptions given by the ancient Indian grammarians very closely resemble the modern phonetic descriptions. The three main stages recognized by them in their description are the processes of articulation, the segments and the synthesis of the segments in phonological structures. Tolkappiam, the earliest extant grammar of Tamil, which belongs to the pre-Christian era gives a clear account of the classification and description of Tamil sounds. Although the primary concern of the ancient Indian phoneticians seems to have been to maintain the correct pronunciation, their observations about points and manner of articulation reveal their phonetic knowledge. It is also evident that the Indian phoneticians operated within the intuitive concept of the "psychological reality of phonemes' and devised alphabets for their languages on segmental phonemic lines. However, their expertise had no influence on the development of linguistic thought anywhere else in the world.
While Greek and Roman scholars did not match the phonetic and phonological brilliance of ancient India, they were interested in related issues such as the orthographic representation of the spoken forms. The modern European style of alphabetic writing has its roots in the Greek adaptation of Phoenician symbols. The Greek innovation was to develop separate vowel letters alongside the consonants. This convention is now standard in modern European orthographies. The Japanese Hiragana syllabary, for example, has in principle a distinct symbol for each syllable of the language. In China, a system of written characters was in use by 2000 BC. In Korea, Chinese characters were long used to write Korean, but an indigenous alphabet came into use in the middle of the fifteenth century. Persian and Arabic had a long tradition of literacy in the systems of writing.
In what follows, the development of the concept of phoneme and other related phonological theories are sketched.
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