BREV TIL: Eli Fischer-Jørgensen FRA: Charles Ernest Bazell (1955-02-09)

Istanbul 9/2/55

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^ear Miss Fischer-Jorgensen, Many thanks for your letter, iou have very well overcome the obscurities of my note, for which 1 ap/ologise. rhere are no serious misunderstandings. As for details (i)As you say, "intrinsic similarity" and "composition" may often come to the same thing, .this is so if we confihe ourselves to a given medium. xO say that two sounds are intrinsically similar, is to say that they are similarly composed. ±>ut even here there is some difference of usage. One might say that English and Danish h were intrinsically similar, without committing oneself to saying that either could be decomposed at all. And a unit that cannot be decom- posed is not usually said to have any composition, mt of course, two intrinsic- ally similar units, if they can be split into parts, must have the same composi- tion

8 T JNow x had not noticed when writing the paper, that 1 had Implied that Jak- obson’s "minimal units are not, for him, really minimal units. His substantial terms, such as nasal, can of course be taken as minimal, but a formal term such as compact, since it is not a matter of distributional form, must be a matter of compositional form. Compactness refers to a realtion (let us say "nearness") be- tween the parts of a unit; it presupposes therefore that the unit has parts«, cut of course it is only when one takes the terms at their face value that this hold.j • Actually, the term compact is a formal label for a phonetic characteristic* not just 'nearness of parts", but "nearness/ of acoustic formants", this "nearness" in its turn being at a lower l@vel of analysis than feature-analysis in Jakobsen3s sense* whereby it is the effect of the relations, taken globally, that is treated, as minimal.

(ii)By functional and non-functional I meant, as you suspected, "having" an not having", a distinctive function. ± would have done better just to use the word distinctive• But this, i think,is a common use as illustrated b£ Martinet1 "Phonemics as functional phonetics". (My use in "Linguistic Form" is qtiiite dif- ferent; but not many readers would be likely to know this booklet.)

(iii)^ou give a very fair account of what x mean by form and substance. 1 was content to repeat the usual definition of "having the same form" (isomorph- ismJ without entering into the question of what would be meant by "having the same substance". I just took it that a phonetic text is par exceL&nce the sub- stance investigated by the linguist, anything similar from the linguist's point of view (^e.g. a graphic text) is substantial in the same way. £>ut "situations ' are not substantial in the same way. A linguist may examine phonetic facts to find out how far they are relevant, but he never examines the facts of a situation in order to find out whther these are relevant. Mne is temp- ted to say that the linguist "picks out" certain phonetic facts in the speech- continuum, and also "picks out certain facts from the flux of eventsfelike a child who grasps approximately what is intended by the word walk, in answer to the question "what ate you doing?"), ^hit this is almost like comparing "picking a flower and "picking the captain of a team". There is no captain, until he has been picked". True, neither the linguist nor the child create the situation, but .they participate in it; it is not the same situation without them0 une docs n°t start from things, in the same way as one starts from sounds, in a linguis- tic analysis. 4,hen one tries to start from things. in linguistic analysis, one very soon find? that one is really atarting, not from things, but from a different language• rerhaps I may send some more remarks; but meanwhile 1 hasten to send the ori- ginal, in case spill red wine on it and am hence only able to send a copyj Best wishes

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