RE: PCL (was RE: Use of interum PUA encodings for 85 letters)

From: Michael Maxwell (mmaxwell@casl.umd.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 16 2007 - 07:01:12 CDT

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    > "Paratone" doesn't mean what Philippe has said it means
    > (namely "near homotones").

    But what are these "near homotones"? I was embarassed as a linguist to ask, until I googled it and came up with only 165 hits for "homotone", mostly in French. Most of the English hits are traceable back to the pcl-institute.org, which gives what appears to be an idiosynchratic definition: homotones are "ideograms which have the same pronunciation in both sound and tone but differ in design and in meaning", i.e. what I would call homophones (like 'their' and 'there' in English).

    But what is a *near* homotone? A linguist's minimal pair with a hard-to-hear phonemic distinction? That would be odd, since phonemic distinctions are usually easy enough for _native_ speakers to hear.

       Mike Maxwell
       CASL/ U Md

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