From ... Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed.esat.net!nslave.kpnqwest.net!nloc.kpnqwest.net!nmaster.kpnqwest.net!nreader1.kpnqwest.net.POSTED!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: case-sensitivity and identifiers (was Re: Wide character implementation) References: <87wuw92lhc.fsf@becket.becket.net> <1016554947.964486@haldjas.folklore.ee> <3225568971513146@naggum.net> <1016831590.163240@haldjas.folklore.ee> <3225841444459787@naggum.net> <1016909497.106880@haldjas.folklore.ee> <3225923202075012@naggum.net> <87it7m4mnm.fsf@becket.becket.net> <3225942059872001@naggum.net> <871ye9i91x.fsf_-_@cs.uga.edu> <3226021614417921@naggum.net> <3226054464281011@naggum.net> <322606153 <3226098099655467@naggum.net> <87zo0wqd48.fsf@becket.becket.net> <3226104706223880@naggum.net> <874rj4uey3.fsf@becket.becket.net> Mail-Copies-To: never From: Erik Naggum Message-ID: <3226112482576869@naggum.net> Organization: Naggum Software, Oslo, Norway Lines: 43 User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 06:21:08 GMT X-Complaints-To: newsmaster@KPNQwest.no X-Trace: nreader1.kpnqwest.net 1017123668 193.71.199.50 (Tue, 26 Mar 2002 07:21:08 MET) NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 07:21:08 MET Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.lisp:30143 * 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.