minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut)

[proto-language]

Dear Bob and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Whiting" <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
Sent: Friday, April 14, 2000 1:38 AM

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

>> I am astonished that this discussion has proceeded for several
>> days without anyone questioning the original statement about
>> complementary distribution of [th] and [dh] in modern English,
>> which is simply incorrect. Even if one does not have the
>> pronunciation which makes "either" and "ether" a minimal pair,
>> examples of [th] in voiced environments are not at all hard to
>> find: 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.  Loan words do not necessarily follow
> the phonological rules of the borrowing language.  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.

> I'm sorry if you got confused, but I thought it was clear that I
> was speaking about native English words, not borrowings.  Perhaps
> I should have been explicit, but I really thought that everyone
> knows that when you are trying to establish the phonology of a
> language you should deal with words that are native to that
> language.  I'm surprised that you didn't include 'Athens' in your
> list.  You can make a list of hundreds of words in English that
> have [th] in voiced environments and every one of them will be a
> loan.  There are a very few examples where the complementary
> distribution of [th] and [dh] does break down, but you haven't
> mentioned any of them.

> Basically, anything that comes from Greek theta is going to be
> pronounced [th] in English.  Apparent exceptions like Thomas or
> thyme can be accounted for by tracing the path of the word into
> English.  But even these apparent exceptions only show that [th]
> opposes [t], not that [th] opposes [dh].  Now if you can make a
> similar list of words from Greek or Latin/French where original
> theta is pronounced [dh] (I expect that 'rhythm' and 'logarithm'
> and the similar but unrelated 'algorithm' [but not 'arithmetic']
> are special cases because of the -thm#) or you can show a list of
> words of Germanic origin where intervocalic <th> is pronounced
> [th] then you would have a good point and something to look at.
> If not, not.

> Now "foreign word" is a perceptual category (just as "phoneme"
> is) and it is how the speaker perceives the word that decides
> what phonological (and sometimes morphological) rules he can
> expect to apply.  Moreover, the perception of whether a word is
> foreign or not is likely to change over time (the longer a word
> is in the language the more likely it is to eventually be
> regarded as non-foreign).  And once a word is considered native,
> then it will treated phonologically as a native word.

[PR]

If I understand you correctly, we should anticipate that 'Athens' will
eventually be pronounced /adhNz/. When do you expect that development?
'Athens' has been around for quite a while.

Also, I doubt if one person in a hundred, outside of this list or a similar
one, would identify 'ether' as a 'foreign' word. How have you (or has
someone else) established that native unsophisticated speakers of English
apply one set of rules to 'native' and another to 'foreign' words, and
maintain a discrete category of 'foreign' words distinguished from 'native'
words?

[RW]

> So perhaps
> you are saying that [th] and [dh] are separate phonemes and
> intervocalic [th] is used to mark foreign words since all native
> words will have [dh] intervocalically.  This does not sound
> particularly convincing to me.

> Let's look at what happens with words borrowed from languages
> that do have /dh/.  Since [dh] allegedly has phonemic status in
> English, one would expect that they would be borrowed as [dh]
> just as Greek theta is borrowed as [th] (cf. borrowings with /f/
> and /v/ below).  But if one looks at Arabic 'dhow', although the
> spelling preserves the Arabic /dh/, the pronunciation is with
> [d], not [dh].  And so on.  I know of no example where a word
> with /dh/ in the original has been borrowed as [dh] into English
> despite the frequent preservation of <dh> in the spelling, but if
> there are some then I would consider them as tending to indicate
> phonemic status for [dh] in English.  But I wouldn't be convinced
> without minimal pairs like 'focal' - 'vocal' or 'file' - 'vile'

>> [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.

>    noun (adj.)          verb

>   life                 live
>   half                 halve
>   house [haws]         house [hawz]
>   glass                glaze
>   grass                graze
>   breath               breathe
>   bath                 bathe
>   cloth                clothe
>   wreath               writhe (wreathe)
>   teeth (tooth)        teethe
>   loath (loth)         loathe

>   [An apparent exception is 'tithe' [noun and verb] but this is
>   rather a fossilized form than an exception.  The word
>   originally meant "tenth" and indeed was identical with the
>   contemporary word for "tenth" ('te:odha') with the proper
>   intervocalic voiced [dh].  With the marginalization of the word
>   as a special kind of "tenth", it dropped out of its word class
>   (ordinal numbers) and did not undergo the same changes as the
>   rest of the group, which resulted in the levelling of the
>   category to a final [th].  Thus the pronunciation with final
>   voiced [dh] was preserved in both noun and verb [and is also
>   reflected in the spelling.]

>   [Another form that falls outside the system is 'smooth' (adj.)
>   and 'smoothe' (v.).  Here, again, there is no contrast between
>   [th] and [dh]; [dh] simply appears in an unexpected place.  And
>   while 'smooth' is ancient in English, its origin is unknown.
>   Contrast this with 'sooth' (n.) and 'soothe' (v.).]

> Morphophonemic variants are generally not considered distinct
> phonemes in that environment.  At most they are considered
> morphophonemes and at the least simple allophones because the
> distribution of sounds is governed by rule (in this case a
> morphological-phonological rule) and hence the value of the sound
> is predictable from its environment.  Morphophonemic alternation
> is not sufficient to establish phonemic status (although it is
> often a prelude to it).  Morphophonemic variants may very well be
> phonemically distinct in other environments, but it is the basic
> precept of internal reconstruction that morphophonemic variants
> can normally be traced back to some archephoneme in the
> pre-language.  This is one reason why unrelated words is usually
> a requirement for minimal pairs.

[PR]

Good point, that seems to be overlooked.

[RW]

>> That these two consonants have undergone a split parallel to that
>> of /s/-/z/ and /f/-/v/ in the history of English is hardly
>> controversial view

> Phonemic status is easy to show for /s/ and /z/, somewhat more
> difficult for /f/ and /v/ (but it exists), and very difficult for
> [th] and [dh].

> If you look at a list of English words that begin with [v] you
> will find very few native words ('vat' and 'vixen' are about it).
> But both of these are dialect borrowings in standard English
> replacing earlier 'fat' (vessel) and 'fyxen' (feminine of 'fox'
> with '-en' feminine marker and umlaut).  However, modern 'fat'
> ("fat", cf. G. 'Fett') and 'vat' ("large vessel", cf. G. 'Fass'
> [scharfes s]) are clearly a minimal pair since neither is likely
> to be recognized as a foreign word.  On the other hand, 'focal'
> and 'vocal' are both recognized as foreign words, but the
> distinction /f/-/v/ is sufficient to differentiate them.

[PR]

I dispute whether the average person would consider /voist/ ('voiced') a
*foreign* word as opposed to /foist/('foist').

[RW]

> Speakers now have to recognize inherent [v] sounds in words to
> distinguish them from both inherent [f] sounds and from [v] as a
> morphophonemic variant of /f/. Therefore /f/ and /v/ are separate
> phonemes (almost a borrowed phonemic distinction, but made
> possible by the mophophonemic alternation of [f] and [v]).  As
> for 'of' and 'off', this is a stress difference.  'Off' is simply
> a lexicalized stressed form of 'of' (this is why 'off of' as in
> "get off of the grass" is considered substandard).

>> ("some would doubtless claim") -- I would be most interested to
>> hear of any description of modern English (save perhaps from the
>> Baroque Period of SPE abstractionism) in which this is not taken
>> as a simple fact.

> I dare say that most descriptions of modern English do take this
> as a simple fact (just as many dictionaries will tell you that
> pronominal determiners are pronouns) and therefore not worth
> investigating.  But facts are not data.  Data exists in nature.
> Facts are observations about data.  Facts are a matter of
> interpretation and facts can be wrong.

[PR]

It is, perhaps, inevitable that we cannot reach agreement about 'phoneme'
when such common words as 'fact' are defined so individually. The first
definition of 'fact' in AHD is "1. something known with certainty"; and the
third: "3. something that has been objectively verified".  It is impossible
for me to regard a 'datum' (AHD: "1. an assumed, given, measured, or
otherwise determined *fact* or proposition . . .") as other than a 'fact',
and I would object to "assumed . . . proposition" as being a proper part of
the definition.

[RW]

> Sometimes it is necessary
> to go beyond surface appearances to see if the facts are correct
> interpretations of the data.  What I want to know is what are the
> data on which this "simple fact" of the phonemic status of [th]
> and [dh] in English is based.  In this case, it would seem that
> [th, dh] just ride along on the coattails of [s, z] and [f, v] in
> the belief that if [s, z] and [f, v] split then [th, dh] must
> have too.

> The creation of the allophones of original /s/, /f/, and /th/
> happened for all at the same time:  unvoiced spirants between
> voiced sounds following a stressed vowel became voiced.  This did
> not increase the number of contrasts (phonemes), merely the number
> of allophones (/s/ [s, z]; /f/ [f, v]; /th/ [th, dh]).  The
> phonemic splits came later and for different reasons.  First came
> morphophonemic alternation followed by, for /s/ and /z/, the use
> of /z/ to create expressive and imitative words; for /f/ and /v/,
> the need to differentiate borrowed words with inherent [f] and
> [v]; and, for [th] and [dh] -- well, I just can't think of
> anything that compels the use of [th] and [dh] for making
> distinctions.  If you can provide something, I'd be glad to
> listen to it.  But it will have to be better than loanwords that
> don't contrast with anything else and morphophonemic alternations
> or parallelism with [s, z] and [f, v].

> 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?  Now English does not have the world's greatest fit
> between writing and sounds.  The same sounds can be written with
> different characters and the same characters can be used to write
> different sounds.  In some cases, there is no way to tell how
> certain written combinations are to be spoken.  There is no rule
> to tell you how a word like 'cough' is to be pronounced.  One
> simply has to learn the pronunciation with the word.  But with
> [th] and [dh] this is not necessary, even though there is no clue
> in the writing (with the exception of <-e> in verbs which marks
> the fact that the preceding <th> is voiced).  Otherwise one would
> have to learn the pronunciation of every word containing <th>
> separately.

[PR]

As you seem to be acknowledging, learned pronunciation has really no bearing
on spelling, or each dialect would have a separate orthography.

[RW]

> When dealing with phonemes, if you know the pronunciation, you
> can distinguish a word from all other words with similar
> sounds except for the different phonemes.  Phonemes distinguish
> between words when there is no other criterion for distinguishing
> them and are completely arbitrary.  Thus there is no rule
> (phonological, morphological, or syntactical) for distinguishing
> between /fat/ and /bat/ except the rule that says that /f/ and
> /b/ are different phonemes.  The phonemes /f/ and /b/ don't tell
> you anthing about these words except that they are different.  If
> /f/ were always used only in verbs and /b/ were always used only
> in nouns, then one would have to take another look at the
> phonemic status of /f/ and /b/.

> When dealing with [th] and [dh] if you recogize the word
> category, you will know what the sound is.  You don't have to
> learn the pronunciation with the word except in a very few cases
> (like 'rhythm').  Otherwise, even for words that you may not be
> familiar with like 'thole' or 'wether' or 'heterochthonous' you
> will know whether [th] or [dh] is correct.  Words such as
> 'blithe' which can be pronounced with either [th] or [dh] (not as
> a matter of stress, but simply free variation) do not speak
> strongly in favor of phonemic status for these two sounds
> (athough it doesn't necessarily speak against it either).

> So once again, the only native words where [th] and [dh] contrast
> is 'thigh' and 'thy'.  'Thy' belongs to a class of words that
> always has [dh] in this position.  'Thigh' belongs to a class of
> words (not really a significant class, merely the complement of
> the other class) that always has [th] in this position.  The
> apparent opposition between [th] and [dh] in this example is just
> a historical accident (in much the same way that homynyms come
> into existence through historical accidents) since the original
> distinction between these words did not depend on this
> opposition.  Thus this "minimal pair" is not adequate to establish
> [th] and [dh] as separate phonemes in my opinion since
> distribution of sounds by rule is a more important criterion even
> if the rules are not phonological.

> And again, if you have evidence for the phonemic status of [th]
> and [dh] in English (and I don't mean evidence that they are
> recognized as different sounds [phones] or that they are
> morphophonemic variants), I will be happy to evaluate it.  I just
> haven't found any that I consider convincing despite the fact that
> most grammars will list them as separate phonemes and put forth
> such "minimal pairs" as 'thigh' - 'thy' or 'ether' - 'either' or
> 'wreath' - 'wreathe' as evidence.

> Now there is no reason why [th] and [dh] can't be separate
> phonemes in English.  They might very well be.  Or they might
> well be on their way to becoming separate phonemes.  But if they
> are, one can reasonably expect there to be some evidence of it.
> If [th] and [dh] are different phonemes in English, then it is an
> unused phonemic distinction.  And since it is unused, it can't be
> proved that they aren't phonemically distinct just because there
> is no evidenc that they are.  What can be shown is that [th, dh]
> are allophones of /th/ that resulted from the original voicing of
> spirants in a voiced environment and that these allophones can be
> used as morphophonemic variants.  But without unequivocal
> evidence that they are used as separate phonemes, it is safer to
> assume that they are not.

> In summary, if you find [dh] in initial position in a native
> English word it tells you that the word is a pronoun or a deictic
> word (this, that, thou, then, there).  If you find [th] in a
> voiced environment in English this screams that the word is a
> loan ([insert here list of loan words given above]).  If you find
> [dh] in final position it tells you that the word is part of a
> noun-verb or a singular-plural pair.  What is needed to show that
> [th] and [dh] are distinct phonemes is a clear example where they
> mark an arbitrary distinction in a non-contrastive environment
> that is completely independent of the environment or any rule.

[PR]

A very eloquent presentation of a point of view.

However, apparently, it hinges on one key concept: the distinction in the
minds of native English speakers between 'native' and 'foreign' words, a
distinction that I believe is non-provable.

Furthermore, Old Norse gives us both /raiz/ ('raise') and /rais/ ('race').
If anyone outside of an etymologist knew these origins, of what possibly use
could it be?

Pat

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