Towards a phonological Algorithm

The ultimate goal of phonology is to uncover the mechanism whereby an indiscrete succession of sounds becomes a discrete chain of identifiable phonemes. A word falls naturally into morphemes and syllables. In the course of this double division two classes of languages emerge: those in which syllableand morpheme-boundaries always coincide and those in which this correspondence is not obligatory. In the first case the minimal unit of segmentation is the syllable. In the second case we meet with such examples as domus in Latin, reading i n English, and so on. Syllabically they are do-mus, rea-ding, morphologically dora-us, read-ing; the combined scheme is do-m-us, rea-d-ing. At the initial stage of processing the sound chain we are only able to discriminate between syllabic and phonemic languages, for /In/ in domus and /d / in reading are phonemes, i.e. the smallest units of natural segmentation in non-syllabic languages. This is the most primitive and heuristically the earliest definition of a phoneme that a linguist can give. We will formulate the first instructions to the phonologist thus: