![This is characteristic of most of my old phonology homework. I used to take two copies of an exercise: one for messily figuring out the problem (dead-ends and all), and one for presenting my elegant solution (seemingly divined from the language heavens).
I can see that I struggled with how to gracefully unite the following facts:
Voicing: /t/ becomes [d] before [b] but not [r,a,k,s]
Devoicing: /z/ becomes [s] before [s,k] but not [r,a,b]
Which is why the work is full of rule descriptions like /X/→[Y] / __[+a,-b]. I am trying to condense four descriptions into one single rule: Obstruents regressively match voicing across the morpheme boundary.
It probably looks really messy and foreign, but it’s like a logic or an insight puzzle, and in this respect, I find phonology problems very calming. I also find value in knowing that I describe a fact about Russian prepositions.](http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kolk833pSz1qznraho1_500.jpg)
This is characteristic of most of my old phonology homework. I used to take two copies of an exercise: one for messily figuring out the problem (dead-ends and all), and one for presenting my elegant solution (seemingly divined from the language heavens).
I can see that I struggled with how to gracefully unite the following facts:
- Voicing: /t/ becomes [d] before [b] but not [r,a,k,s]
- Devoicing: /z/ becomes [s] before [s,k] but not [r,a,b]
Which is why the work is full of rule descriptions like /X/→[Y] / __[+a,-b]. I am trying to condense four descriptions into one single rule: Obstruents regressively match voicing across the morpheme boundary.
It probably looks really messy and foreign, but it’s like a logic or an insight puzzle, and in this respect, I find phonology problems very calming. I also find value in knowing that I describe a fact about Russian prepositions.
![The “throw a bunch of stuff against the wall and see what sticks” theory of phonology. [Optimality theory scheme via Wikimedia Commons]](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ot-scheme.png)
