Syllabary proposed for Dee

Dee was the result of my response to Jeff Prothero's article "Design and Implementation of a Near-optimal Loglan Syntax" (May, 1990) in which a language called 'Plan B' is described and Jacques Guy's satirical response (Sept. 1992) in which he referred to 'Plan B' as Bee and his parody of it as Cee. But, as I worked on Dee, I became more and more convinced that any reform of Plan B would make the whole thing collapse. Thus, as the old nursery rhyme says:

A, B, C, tumble-down D,
The cat's in the cupboard
And can't see me.

Therefore, the language was abandoned* and only my proposed Dee syllabary is preserved as some may find this of interest. And the cat in the cupboard? That, methinks, is the one Jacques Guy let out of the bag with Cee.

* The abandoned version of Dee may be found on the Wayback Machine.

How many phonemes does Plan B have?

Jacques Guy writes of Plan B that:

[it] has 16 er... phonemes, because sixteen is a power of two, which makes it computationally desirable. Each phoneme has two allophones, one of which is a vowel, or a diphthong, or the same preceded by "r", the other a consonant. I say: jolly good idea! Indeed, it's like the author says: "By providing both a vowel and a consonant pronunciation for each letter, and using them alternately, we can pronounce arbitrary strings of letters without difficulty". Brilliant. And I, poor sod, who thought a strict CV(V) language would do it!

He goes on to show that, for example, ck (she/her) has the "allomorphs" [ejk] and [ʃi] according to its place in a string of words. But, although I basically agree with Jacques Guy's criticisms of 'Plan B', I think he is being a little unfair to Jeff Prothero. Nowhere, in fact, does Jeff claim that Plan B has sixteen phonemes, nor does he state explicitly or implicitly that each grapheme is intended to represent a phoneme.

It is true that Plan B has sixteen graphemes because sixteen is a power of two, namely 2⁴. But Jeff Prothero says of these sixteen graphemes: "The particular sixteen letters chosen don't matter. ... the particular letters and pronunciations chosen don't matter much." In my view 'Plan B' does not have a phonology but is given a kludgey ad hoc system to enable a string of bits to be pronounced.

Plan B per se has no one single orthography or phonology any more than English has only one method of being encoded as bits for a computer. To talk about the phonology of Plan B is not very meaningful. At best, one can discuss the merits or demerits of Plan B's kludgey ad hoc system of graphemes or and their sound implimentations. But, as Jacques Guy satirically observed, "[a]nd I, poor sod, ... thought a strict CV(V) language would do it!" Of course he is correct, as I show below.

A strict CV language does do it!

Languages with simple phonologies and only (C)V syllables, such as Hawaian, Samoan and other Polynesian languages, manage this quite well without the undesirable features of Plan B. Those undesirable features could be removed at a stroke by giving each bit pattern a CV value, i.e. mapping each bit pattern to syllable.

It seems strange to me that while bits in Plan B were used to determine both the length of morphemes and where word boundaries occur, no use of individual bits was made in mapping Plan B to a written and spoken form. In the system I set out below:

• Each quartet (four bit group) will be mapped not only to a single grapheme but also to a single phonetic realization, namely a (C)V syllable.
• The individual bits in each quartet will determine both the syllable's onset and its rhyme.

A syllabary of 32 or 64 syllables might be deemed more desirable but, as Jeff Prothero wrote: "It is handy to have the alphabet size be a power of two. Eight letters would be less concise, thirty-two would be tough to map onto the standard twenty-six char character set." It is, indeed, difficult to map 32 onto the 26 letters of the modern Roman alphabet, and even more difficult, of course, to map 64 onto these letters. I shall restrict myself to just sixteen syllables to show there is no reason why Plan B could not have been mapped in a similar way.

Sixteen syllables is not many, but there is no reason why we could not have a language with eight consonants and two vowels. Let the two vowels be:

• Front:   /e/ - realized as any front vowel from [ɪ] down to [ɛ] inclusive;
• Back:    /o/ - realized as any front vowel from [ʊ] down to [ɔ] inclusive;

The eight consonants shall be sonorants and obstruents in four grades, thus:

	Sonorant	Obstruent
grade #0	(zero)	/k/	Note: The 'zero' consonant is realized as a semivocalic onset, i.e. [j] before /e/ and as [w] before /o/. The obstruents are voiceless when initial, but may become voiced between vowels. The phoneme /l/ may be realized as any dental or alveolar approximant, whether lateral or not, or as a dental/alveolar flap.
grade #1	/l/	/s/
grade #2	/n/	/t/
grade #3	/m/	/p/

The four grades occur in four series such that series #0 & #1 are sonorants, and series #2 & #3 are obstruents, the even series having the vowel /o/ and the odd having the vowel /e/.

Our sixteen syllables are mapped to bit quartets thus:

• The two most significant bits denote the grades 0 to 3 thus: 00 01 10 11.
• The two least significant bits denote the series 0 to 3 thus: 00 01 10 11
  (It will thus be observed that:
  - the first of these two bits indicates whether the consonant is a sonorant [0] or an obstruent [1],
  - and the second indicaties whether the vowel is /o/ [0] or /e/ [1]).

Putting this all together we arive at our complete syllabary. The table below shows, in bold type, the sixteen symbols we shall use, the phonemic values*, and the bit pattern.

	series #0	series #1	series #2	series #3
grade #0	w /wo/ 0000	y /je/ 0001	g /ko/ 0010	k /ke/ 0011
grade #1	r /lo/ 0100	l /le/ 0101	z /so/ 0110	s /se/ 0111
grade #2	n /no/ 1000	ñ /ne/ 1001	d /to/ 1010	t /te/ 1011
grade #3	µ /mo/ 1100	m /me/ 1101	b /po/ 1110	p /pe/ 1111

* The phonemic status of the semivocalic onsets [w] and [j] is left ambiguous or controversial, as in Modern Chinese.
 

We have had to introduce two symbols not normally included in the Roman alphabet: the ñ used in Spanish, and the symbol µ used to denote the metric prefix micro. The complete syllabary should be ordered gradewise, thus:
  w y g k r l z s n ñ d t µ m b p     (which is also the order of the bit quartets)