Pholology; nothing; Dialectics and inconsistency

Lorenzo Peña «Phonology», «Nothing» & «Dialectics and Inconsistency» Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology ed. by H. Burkhardt & Barry Smith Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1991 [pp. 703-6, 619-21 & 216-8 (resp).] ISBN 3-88405-080X PHONOLOGY An outstanding characteristic of human “natural” language is the linearity of its messages, which is nothing else but the fact that contrasts, i.e. relationships among elements found together within one message, are displayed along one dimension only. Even though such linearity is far from complete, it has impressed many students of language for centuries, cha- racterizing as it does both the first and second articulation, i.e. not only the relationship among meaningful elements but also that among non-meaningful but distinctive ones. The latter are the phonemes. For thousands of years students of language have been aware of the existence of phonemes, i.e. minimal segments within the spoken message whose presence is relevant for distinguishing one message from a different one with another meaning even though the phonemes themselves lack any meaning whatsoever. (An anticipation of a modern phonological treatment is to be found in the work of King Sejong of Korea (reigned 1418-50), the founder of the Korean featural script Han’gu˘l; see Sampson, pp. 120ff.) The main difficulty concerning the existence and nature of phonemes is that each of them underlies a great many different phonetic realizations.