minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut)

[Stanley Friesen]

At 09:38 AM 4/14/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote:

>On Fri, 07 Apr, Ross Clark <r.clark at auckland.ac.nz> wrote:

>>... pathology, authority, anathema, mathematics, Gothic,
>>Arthur, etc etc.

>And I am astonished that anyone would present a list of
>loanwords, however long, and claim that it has some bearing on
>native English phonology.

All of the listed words are old loans, and are fully Anglicized.  They are
no longer perceived as "foreign" by the majority of speakers.  Thus they
are indeed quite relevant to the *current* phonemic status of the sounds
they include.

>   Loan words do not necessarily follow
>the phonological rules of the borrowing language.

Only before they are nativized.  Once nativized, they become relevant.

>   In fact this
>is usually one of the first clues that a word is a loan when it
>doesn't obey the phonological rules.  This is how you can tell
>that 'father' is a native (inherited) word and 'padre' is a loan.

'Padre' is still perceived as a Spanish word in English.  Few even know
that 'authority' is NOT originally a native word.

>> [dh] occurs in word-final position in breathe, bathe, writhe, etc

>These are morphophonemic variants.  One method of forming verbs
>from nouns in English is by voicing a final unvoiced spirant.

And in all of your examples the two sounds are phonemically distinct.
That is /s/-/z/, and /f/-/v/ are good phoneme pairs, so this is not an
argument for denying /dh/ phonemic status.

Also, I am not sure I would allow word derivation processes to use
NON-phonemic changes.  The very fact that a sound difference can be used in
word derivation is, to my mind, evidence that the difference is in fact
phonemic.

>But before you get too deeply involved in trying to find
>something, consider this also simple fact:  If it is not possible
>for English speakers to determine the pronunciation of <th>
>as [th] or [dh] entirely by rule, how is it possible for the
>graphemic system to get by with only one grapheme for the two
>sounds?

In the same way that Hebrew can get by with a writing system that does not
represent most vowels, and the same way Mycenian Greek could get by with a
syllabic writing system that failed to represent the pronunciation of the
language.

Answer: a native speaker has the vocabulary *memorized*, so they *know*
which words are pronounced which way, and read that *into* the written word.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com