¹ Yuen-ren Chao, ‘The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems’, Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica 55:4.363–97 (1934). Reprinted in M. Joos, ed., Readings in linguistics 38–54 (Washington, 1957).

² Syntactic structures (The Hague, 1957).

³ Compare those considered for adoption by W. Freeman Twaddell, On defining the phoneme, Language monograph 16 (1935), also reprinted in Joos, RIL 55–79.

⁴ This is the pole of triviality discussed in Karl V. Teeter, ‘Descriptive linguistics in America: Triviality vs. irrelevance’, Word 20.197–206 (1964).

⁵ Paper cited in fn. 1. For example, at the end of the second paragraph, 'Different ... solutions are not simply correct or incorrect, but may be regarded only as being good or bad for various purposes.' And note the last two sentences: 'Usage may in time become unified, but problems will always vary. Our motto must be: Write, and let write!'

⁶ These facts are already clearly expressed in Morris Swadesh, ‘The vowels of Chicago English’, Lg. 11.148–51 (1935), written in response to Leonard Bloomfield's analysis in ‘The stressed vowels of American English’, Lg. 11.97–116 (1935), and earlier in the works of Daniel Jones and others.

⁷ This is asked, for example, by H. A. Gleason Jr., An introduction to descriptive linguistics ² 317–18 (New York, 1961). Gleason's discussion suggests that there must be such a basis, though he does not supply one.

⁸ This decision is clearly made in L. Bloomfield, op.cit. (fn. 6), as well as in Bloomfield's Language (New York, 1933), elaborated in George L. Trager and Bernard Bloch, ‘The syllabic phonemes of English,‘ Lg. 17.223–46 (1941), consummated in George L. Trager and Henry Lee Smith Jr., Outline of English structure ² (Washington, 1956), and accepted in the two major modern American textbooks, C. F. Hockett, A course in modern linguistics (New York, 1958), and H. A. Gleason Jr., op.cit. (fn. 7).

⁹ Trager and Bloch, op.cit. (fn. 8) 233. Another difference, which Swadesh (op.cit. in fn. 6) makes one of his main points, is that the long (his ‘sharp‘) vowels do not occur before ŋ;.

¹⁰ It should be evident that by a priori I do not mean ‘fixed for all time’: any such decision must be a falsifiable hypothesis about the nature of language.

¹¹ See N. Trubetzkoy, Grundzüge der Phonologie (TCLP 7, 1939); R. Jakobson and M. Halle, Fundamentals of language (The Hague, 1956); and the monumental monograph of Gunnar Fant, Acoustic theory of speech production (The Hague, 1960). Useful as a historically oriented introduction are Chaps. 3–4 of Morris Halle, Sound pattern of Russian (The Hague, 1959).

¹² Although, as has been frequently pointed out, this simply goes back with more definiteness to the grammar of the ancient Hindus culminating in the work of Pānini.

¹³ This feature is specifically discussed in the paper of R. Jakobson and M. Halle, ‘Tenseness and laxness’, originally appearing in In honour of Daniel Jones (London, 1962), also printed in Roman Jakobson, Selected writings 1.550–5 (1962).

¹⁴ Swadesh (op.cit. in fn. 6) already recognized this even without the acoustic evidence for the feature pair, which he called sharp vs. blunt.

¹⁵ Compare the quotations in fn. 5.

¹⁶ Twaddell, op.cit. (fn. 3) proposes precisely this solution.

¹⁷ Strictly speaking, of course, one should rather say that tenseness is phonetically irrelevant before r in monosyllables, and this is the fact expressed in citations of the defective distribution of vowels in this environment. But the point here is that dear has a tense vowel in the inventory of English words, in the dictionary.