Date:         Thu, 13 Apr 2000 04:56:24 -0500
From:         Mike Salovesh <t20mxs1@CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU>
Subject:      Emic and etic?

Since Ron Kephart hasn't taken up the real challenge of this discussion,
I guess it falls on me.  God knows I've spent long enough talking with
both Marvin Harris and Kenneth Pike about what they meant by "emic" and
"etic".  My conclusion is that there was no way those two were ever
going to agree: Marvin Harris simply did not, and does not, and probably
will never, understand what linguists like Kenneth Pike do.  I therefore
doubt that he will ever come close to understanding what Pike meant by
"emics" and "etics".

As I recall, the terms "emic" and "etic" first appear in an article
Kenneth Pike wrote for something called a "unified encyclopedia of the
sciences".  I remember the publication date as somewhere around 1938 to
1940; the publisher was the U of Chicago Press.  The planned
encyclopedia was abandoned, but a single volume was published containing
all the articles that were on hand when the project died.

I got my copy of that volume as a gift from George L. Trager, and I used
to keep it in a place of honor in my office.  I can't cite it properly
and exactly because it's still in one of the crates I had to pack in a
hurry when I was evicted from my office. The NIU anthropology department
decided that retired professors don't need offices.  Or connections to
the fiber-optic computer network, for that matter. All of a sudden, four
of us who still live here and are very active in the profession found
ourselves out in the cold. Moral: screw them.

The article was Pike's attempt to tell non-linguists about the
procedures that
underlie the practice of structural linguistics.  His purpose was to
suggest that other social scientists would do well to follow the same
conceptual model.

Pike pointed out that linguistic procedure begins with fine-grained
description.
To linguists raised in the traditions of structural linguistics (or what
some call Bloomfieldian linguistics), that had a very direct meaning.
What the linguist was supposed to do was listen to human speech with an
ear specially trained to note fine distinctions between one speech act
and another.  The training involved a great deal of practice in making
marks on paper according to a system that provides a way of noting any
sound that humans make with the speech apparatus.  Part of the reason
for all that practice -- always under the direction of an experienced
practitioner -- was to calibrate one linguist's perceptions to standards
shared with all other linguists.

The specific notation system that most phoneticians use started with the
definitions attached to symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet,
or IPA.  Recognizing that IPA was originally developed by people who
spoke European languages for the purpose of recording European
languages, descriptive linguists modified IPA to cover the entire set of
all sounds that can be made in any human language.  (Why a "set", not
just "all sounds"?  Because linguists agreed that they would only deal
with sounds of a particular kind.  They'll analyze a burp, a hiccup, or
even a sneeze, but not a fart.)

The underlying drive was to ensure that linguistic analysis would begin
with a corpus of observations about language that would be the same when
made by any two competent investigators.  The alphabet itself is
immaterial; what is important is that two observers attend to the same
behavioral phenomena and agree about what they have observed.  The
alphabet -- the symbolic notation system -- is simply a means of
representing the essential elements of the behavior under observation.
It is based on detailed knowledge of what happens to noises you make
with your mouth when you vary any of the factors that produce sound
differences.

The distinctions to which a phonetician attends include, among other
things, noting whether the sounds, the vibrations in a medium, are
produced by air being drawn into the lungs or other cavities or by air
being expelled from those cavities. They go on to whether the vocal
cords are vibrating during the production of the sounds, and where the
path from the lungs or other cavity is modified (by closure, by
constriction, etc.) by which parts of the vocal apparatus. (Side note:
In essence, whatever the symbols used, their purpose is to record a set
of formulas that can be played back to reproduce the sounds heard by the
linguist.  "Played back", here, means read aloud by someone else trained
in phonetics and judged as meaningfjul by the original speaker.)

Faced with an actual speech event, two phoneticians would agree that a
particular sound is produced by the two lips coming together to shut off
the stream of sound, and that the vocal chords are vibrating when this
happens.  When they talk about the resultant sound, they'll call it a
voiced bilabial stop.  One might write the Roman letter B while the
other writes a Greek beta, but what the symbols in their notebooks mean
in terms of how the sound was produced would be in one-to-one agreement.
Both would try to note the finest details of any little variation they
could perceive.  Every detail is a relevant phonetic fact.

Phonetics, in short, uses a universal system for organizing observation
that is independent of the observer. Two observers should produce
records that back-translate to exactly the same sounds.  The system
produces a record, on paper, that is sufficient to represent the sounds
any linguist should hear in a single stream of speech.  The fineness of
detail in that record is limited only by the training of the observer in
applying the universal scheme.

Hence "etic", for Pike, means the kind of detail that any well-trained
observer would record for any language event -- regardless of the
language in which it occurs or the language the observer speaks.

Let me repeat Pike's main point, so far.  "Etics", at least in theory,
is universal in two senses: it can be applied systematically and
fruitfully to any body of language behavior in the real world, and any
two properly trained observers will come up with essentally the same
record of that behavior.

Linguistic analysis doesn't end with a phonetic notation of how a vocal
apparatus made a bunch of noises.  That's just the initial observational
data.

Speaking now of the physics of the vocal apparatus, nobody ever
pronounces a word the same way twice.  Not if you slice the components
finely enough.  The position of the tongue in producing a vowel-like
sound, for example, isn't determined by locking a gear into a tightly
defined detent.  In trying to say the same word twice, the tongue raises
or lowers to slightly different points -- if you measure the difference
in millimeters or even finer measurements. The sounds produced depend on
the exact shape and volume of the space defined by the position of the
tongue, and an extremely small difference in those elements produces a
different sound. A skilled phonetician can notice lots more differences
of that sort than the rest of us: that's what phonetic training is
about.

Clearly, if most of us don't even know how to notice all the differences
a phonetician can hear, then all differences aren't equal.  Some
differences make a difference and some don't.

I'm a guy who speaks two languages comfortably, and I can make myself
understood one way or another in perhaps half a dozen more. Each of
those languages requires that I pay attention to a different set of
differences between sounds.

Let me take a shortcut to what that means.  When I speak English, the
differences in sounds between the words we spell "beat" and "bit" are
quite important.  They unequivocally show that those are two different
words.  When I speak Spanish, however, I can use either one of those
sounds to replace the other without being misunderstood.  The
differences between the sounds never produce a difference in meaning.
If I had spent most of my life speaking Spanish as my only language, I
would have a terrible problem if I then tried to learn to speak
English.  Just think of the trouble I could get into by substituting the
vowel of "bit", instead of the vowel in "beat", when talking about "the
sheet on my bed".

After a phonetician has recorded an extensive body of data about how a
speaker produces the sounds of a language, the next job is to find out
which of the differences heard by the phonetician makes a difference in
the specific language
of that speaker.  That's the job of phonemic analysis -- or phonemics,
in short.

Condensing a lot of linguistic theory and assumptions, I'll assert that
the application of phonemic analysis begins with the assumption that any
specific language makes use of only a limited set of the sound
differences the mouths of its speakers could produce.  Most sounds that
they could make are simply not used for language purposes.  (How do we
know they could make those sounds if they don't use them?  Because other
people, whose vocal apparatus is essentially the same, do make use of
those sounds.) Within the range of sounds that are used in a single
language, some differences always make a difference.

To find out what differences make a difference *within a single
language*, it's necessary to reduce the almost infinite number of
distinctions that a trained phonetician might attend to down to a much
smaller number.  That means lumping  bunches of sounds into classes of
sounds.  A meaningful linguistic analysis aims to lump all the sounds of
a particular language into sets whose members, though different, are
equivalent to each other.  The equivalence is defined by saying
that a native speaker of the language will accept two words as "the
same" when their only significant difference is that one sound has been
substituted for
the other.

A set, or class, of sounds that don't make a difference when substituted
for each other in a single language are members of a single phoneme in
that language.

That's only the beginnning of an operational definition of "phoneme",
however.

Sometimes two sounds that are quite similar can't be substituted for
each other, but still never produce a difference in meaning.  One clasic
example includes the sounds standard English spelling represents with
the letter "p" in the words "pot" and "spot".  Hold your hand in front
of your mouth and say those two words, and you'll feel a puff of breath
against your hand after the p of pot that you won't feel after the p of
spot.  (I used to show this in a classroom by holding a lighted match in
front of my mouth and saying spot, which had little effect, then saying
pot, which often blew out the match.) The two sounds clearly are
different.  As it happens, they never occur in the same place.

That is, I can write a rule that says "if the sound environment is at
the beginning of a word and the following sound is a vowel, the unvoiced
bilabial stop is aspirated. If the sound occurs between word-initial /s/
and a following vowel, the unvoiced bilabial stop is not aspirated." In
other words, /p/ at the start of a word is followed by a puff of air if
the following sound is a vowel; if the word begins with /s/, followed by
/p/ and a vowel, there is no puff of air.  (Note about standard
linguist's shorthand: /p/ indicates "the phoneme this system indicates
with the symbol 'p'.")

In doing phonemics, one rule is that two similar sounds which never
produce a contrast in meaning can be included in a single phoneme.  I
won't bother specifying the rest of the rules and procedures followed in
reducing a body of phonetic data to a phonemic analysis of the data:
this is enough to give the general idea.  The whole idea of such an
analysis is to reduce a detailed and complicated set of observations
expressed in a universally applicable framework to a much smaller set of
classes, each of which includes a group of similar sounds whose
differences don't make a difference IN ONE SPECIFIC LANGUAGE.

Side note: Please take what Ron said seriously.  Linguists are trained
to take their notes in ink, and never erase what they write. Mistakes
are part of the data, and they often turn out to reveal more than all
the things that are recorded "correctly".  Similarly, phonetic data are
never discarded in the process of phonemic analysis.  All the different
sounds written in the phonetic transcription of a body of linguistic
data are retained.  Phonemic analysis is a way of classifying those
phonetic data into larger units on a functional basis.

"Phonemics" -- and what Pike meant by "emics" -- is just the
classification of data that anyone, outsider or insider, can be trained
to perceive into sets of data that are treated as significant units
within a single language.  The sets, the classes, of data that are
significant units in one language are unique to that language.

Marvin Harris muddied the waters considerably when he tried to make
"emics" and "etics" fit into the framework of the views of "insiders"
and "outsiders".  That is just not what Pike's kind of linguist -- or
anybody trained in classical, Bloomfieldian linguistic analysis -- would
understand by the words "emics" and "etics" that Pike created.

Wow.  I've stayed up nearly all night trying to reduce most of a course
in phonetics and phonemics into a single message.  Obviously, I didn't
succeed in condensing it very much.  I hope what I've said here helps at
least some Anthro-L folks get more of a handle on why Harris's words
"emic" and "etic" just doesn't come out of the same universe of
discourse as the same words as used by Kenneth Pike.  (And that's why at
least some of us avoid Harris's words entirely.)

-- mike salovesh  <salovesh@niu.edu>     PEACE !!!