minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut)

[Dr ChRIS CLEiRIGh]

On Mon, 3 Apr 2000, Robert Whiting wrote:

> At 09:00 PM 3/30/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote:

>>> Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th]
>>> and [dh] in English on the basis of this minimal pair (although
>>> some would doubtless claim that there has been a phomemic split
>>> similar to what occurred with /s/ and /z/).  This is because
>>> otherwise the sounds are in complementary distribution, [dh]
>>> occuring in voiced environments and in deictic words and
>>> pronouns, [th] otherwise.

> Yes, perhaps I should have said "many" people rather than "most"
> at the beginning.  The fact that this is a grammatically
> conditioned environment is preciesely the fact that leads some to
> insist that [th] and [dh] must be phonemically distinct (despite
> the fact that the only minimal pair that can be produced looks
> more like a historical accident than a true minimal distinction).
> Others have tried to explain the differnce as resulting from
> stressed and unstressed forms and thus provide a phonetic
> environment for the distribution rules.  The question becomes how
> much grammatical information do you allow to affect the
> phonology.

> I'm sure that most English speakers recognize [th] and [dh] as
> different sounds.  The question is do they recognize them as
> different phonemes.  If you ask English speakers how the plural
> is formed they will say that you add -s to the word.  Linguists
> know, however, that what is added in most cases is not -[es] but
> [ez].  This does not mean that the speaker is not aware of the
> distinction between [s] and [z].  The speaker is describing the
> spelling rule, not the pronunciation rule.  Now at one time /z/
> was not a phoneme distinct from /s/ in English.  The
> pronunciation was predictable from the environment.  The
> appearance of the two as morphophonemic variants, however, led to
> a phoneme split so that now /z/ is recognized as a phoneme, and
> so phonemic status is found only in words of recent origin, most
> of which are expressive in nature (sip ~ zip; sap ~ zap; fuss ~
> fuzz, etc.).  The phones [th] and [dh] are in much the same
> relationship as earlier [s] and [z], occurring in predictable
> environments (although not always predictable on a phonetic
> basis) or as morphonemic variants.  However, there are no new
> coinings where [th] opposes [dh] so one suspects that the
> speakers do not consider them separate phonemes (yet).

Does your dialect recognise a distinction between `teeth' and `teethe'?

chris