minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut)

[Ante Aikio]

[Patrick Ryan wrote]

>>>> True minimal pairs, a paltry requirement for phonemicity that would be
>>>> undisputed in any other language.

[Someone wrote]

>>> Not at all.  Many phonemes are accepted as such *without* minimal pairs
>>> even in living languages.

[Patrick Ryan]

>> You assertion by itself does not convince me.

>> Would you mind citing an example of any phoneme in any language that is not
>> in a minimal pair?

The criteria for establishing phonemes were already discussed, but I would
like to point out another thing: in my opinion, minimal pairs are not a
reasonable requirement to establishing phonemes when one is dealing with
reconstructed proto-languages and not living languages. This is because
only a fraction of the vocabulary can be reconstructed, and there probably
aren't enough minimal pairs to establish the oppositions. The
reconstructed PIE vocabulary is rather large, but if we look at PU with
some 250-300 reconstructed roots, I seriously doubt it is possible to
establish even half of the phoneme oppositions using minimal pairs.

Ante Aikio