is a systematic gap, which results from the rules of the English sound system.
However, English
speakers are not consciously aware of those rules, and are highly unlikely to tell a linguist
asking about those words that the absence of *fnil reflects the unacceptability of word-
initial consonant sequences, or clusters, with [fn-] in English: the more likely answer is that
snil‘sounds all right’ (and if you’re lucky, your informant will produce similar words like sniff or
snip to back up her argument), but that *fnil‘ just sounds wrong’.
It is the job of the phonologist to express generalisations of this sort in precise terms:
after all, just because knowledge is not conscious, this does not mean it is unreal, unimportant or
not worth understanding. When you run downstairs, you don’t consciously think ‘left gluteus
maximus, left foot, right arm; right gluteus maximus,right foot, left arm’ on each pair of steps.
In fact, you’re unlikely to make any conscious decisions at all, below the level of
wanting to go down-stairs in the first place; and relatively few people will know the names of
the muscles involved.
In fact, becoming consciously aware of the individual activities involved is quite
likely to disrupt the overall process: think about what you’re doing, and you finish the descent
nose-first.
All of this is very reminiscent of our everyday use of spoken language. We decide to
speak, and what about, but the nuts and bolts of speech production are beyond our conscious
reach; and thinking deliberately about what we are saying, and how we are saying it, is
likely to cause self-consciousness and hesitation, interrupting the flow of fluent speech
rather than improving matters.
Both language and mobility (crawling,walking, running downstairs) emerge in
developing children by similar combinations of mental and physical maturation, internal
abilities, and input from the outside world. As we go along, what we have learned
becomes easy, fluent and automatic; we only become dimly aware what complexity lies
behind our actions when we realise we have made a speech error, or see and hear a child
struggling to say a word or take a step.
Phonologists, like anatomists and physiologists, aim to help us understand the
nature of that underlying complexity, and to describe fully and formally what we know in a
particular domain, but don’t know we know. The relationship between phonetics and
phonology is a complex one, but we might initially approach phonology as narrowed-
down phonetics. Quite small babies, in the babbling phase, produce the whole range of possible
human sounds, including some which they never hear from parents or siblings: a baby in an
English-speaking environment will spontaneously make consonants which are not found in
any European language, but are to be found closest to home in an African language, say, or one
from the Caucasus.
However, that child will then narrow down her range of sounds from the full human
complement to only those found in the language(s) she is hearing and learning, and will
claim, when later trying to learn at school another language with a different sound
inventory, that she cannot possibly produce unfamiliar sounds she made perfectly naturally
when only a few months old.
Or within a language, subtle mechanical analysis of speech reveals that every utterance of
the same word, even by the same speaker, will be a tiny fraction different from every other;
yet hearers who share that language will effortlessly identify the same word in each case. In
this sense, phonetics supplies an embarrassment of riches, providing much more information
than speakers seem to use or need: all those speakers, and every utterance different!
Phonology, on the other hand, involves a reduction to the essential information, to what
speakers and hearers think they are saying and hearing. The perspective shifts from more units to
fewer, from huge variety to relative invariance, from absolutely concrete to relatively
abstract; like comparing the particular rose I can see from my window, or roses generally in all
their variety (old-fashioned, bushy, briar; scented or not; red, yellow, shocking pink), to The
Rose, an almost idea land abstract category to which we can assign the many different actual
variants. A white dog-rose, a huge overblown pink cabbage rose, and anew, genetically
engineered variety can all be roses with no contra-diction involved. In linguistic terms, it’s
not just that I say tomahto and you say tomayto; it’s that I say tomahto and tomahto and tomahto,
and the three utterances are subtly different, but we both think I said the same thing three times.
