minimal pairs are not always there

[Gábor Sándi]

[ Moderator's note:
  Robert Whiting's posting quoted below was in response to, and quoted from,
  a previous message from John McLaughlin dated 13 Apr 2000.  I have added the
  proper attribution where needed.
  --rma ]

On Saturday, 22 April, 2000 Robert Whiting <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:

Subject: RE: minimal pairs are not always there

[ JMcL wrote:]

>> [Robert Whiting]
>> I would say that even a minimal pair is not a sufficient condition to
>> establish two sounds as separate phonemes.

I am entering this debate somewhat late, but I do have strong opinions on it.

In my view, the main purpose of phonemic analysis is to provide for an
unambiguous way to describe the pronunciation of every utterance in a
language. Therefore if there is a single pair of words distinguished by the
presence of sound A in one and sound B in the other (this is the definition
of "minimal pairs"), this should be sufficient to establish a phonemic
difference. In any dialect of English where "either" may be pronounced
/i:dh at r/ (@ stands for the schwa), the existence of the minimal pair
either/ether is then sufficient to establish the existence of separate
phonemes /dh/ and /th/.

Of course, other pairs like thy/thigh, this'll/thistle etc. will reinforce
this analysis.

You may of course not accept my approach, but I do not see the utility of a
phonemic system that cannot uniquely map the pronunciation of every word in
a language. Imagine writing a description of the English sound system, say
of the "General American" dialect. If you don't accept the phonemicity of
/dh/, you will presumably provide a list of eight fricatives:

/f/ /v/ /th/ /s/ /z/ /sh/ /zh/ /h/

Next you will say that some of these come in voiceless/voiced pairs: /f/ -
/v/, /s/ - /z/ and /sh/ - /zh/. One (/h/) is always voiceless. Finally,
there is a curious phoneme /th/, which is voiceless initially (except in
function words) and in word-final position in nouns (bath) and adjectives
(uncouth), but voiced between vowels (except when not), after consonants
(further), and in word-final position in verbs (bathe). Words of foreign
origin (as if native speakers cared) would have their own rules (Athens,
anthem). No doubt other sub-rules could be added, ad infinitum.

Now why would this analysis be superior to one that said that English had
nine fricatives (/f/  /v/  /th/  /dh/  /s/  /z/  /sh/  /zh/  /h/ )?

Here you need no distributional rules, just a specification of the
articulation of each phoneme: voiceless labiodental fricative etc.

[snip]

> No problem.  I have no vested interest in any theory that either
> requires or doesn't require [th] and [dh] to be separate phonemes.
> I'm just looking to find out what the evidence is and how the evidence
> proves it one way or the other.

[ JMcL wrote:]

>> The evidence for establishing /th/ and /dh/ as separate phonemes is
>> no worse than that for establishing /zh/, /ng/, and /oj/ as phonemes
>> (depending on whether or not one considers diphthongs to be on the
>> same footing as other phonemes in the language).

> I think it is quite a bit worse.  How many of /zh/, /ng/, or /oj/
> occur only in certain classes of words or only as morphophonemic
> alternants?  Show me that in all the words where /zh/ occurs that /zh/
> limits or restricts the meanings that it can have and I will grant you
> the point.  It is said that /ng/ only occurs in word final position,
> but even this is not true (compare 'finger' - 'singer').  These may be
> difficult to establish as phonemes, but there is solid evidence:
> places where these sounds provide the only contrast and cannot be
> predicted by rule.  Show me the same for [dh] and I will grant you the
> point.

[GS]

Once you accept nonphonetic conditioning factors, there is no end to the
elimination of phonemes from a system. Take two of your examples above:

/ng/ - not a phoneme. We can analyze it as the allophone of /n/ before /k/
and /g/. /g/ is then dropped ("zero allophone" - why not?) in final position
after /n/, and before the derivative suffix -er (as in "singer"), although
not before the comparative -er (as in "longer"). There remain some
exceptions, like the name of my favourite Canadian city (Vancouver is
pronounced /vaenku:v at r/ by locals), but this is clearly a loanword, or
(maybe) two morphemes: Van Couver.

/zh/ - who needs it? Using the logic of reductionism, we shall elaborate a
set of rules to account for this sound:

(1) It is an allophone of the phoneme /j/, occurring in loanwords from
French (genre, garage, mirage). The phoneme /j/ in native words like 'edge'
/ej/ remains [j], whereas this pronunciation does not occur in loanwords.
Where it does, one may always set up a new word category: loanwords that
have been fully assimilated to the sound structure of English. This will
take care of troublesome words like jet, gene and magenta.

(2) In words like azure, seisure and invasion, /zh/ is derived from the
sequence of phonemes z + y. (/azyu:r/, /si:zy at r/ and /inveyzy at n/). Come to
think of it, didn't Chomsky and Halle analyze English along these lines, to
get back at those dreadful structuralists of the 50's?

With sufficient ingenuity, I am sure we can come up with rules to eliminate
other phonemes from English: /v/ and /@r/ (bird, fern, word) come
immediately to mind.

My main point, I hope readers realize, is that this kind of analysis is not
very helpful. A simple description of the phonemic structure of a language
should account for all differences that are potentially distinctive,
irrespective of the morphology, semantics or etymological provenance of the
words in question.

It is a  noteworthy fact that there tend to be correlations between certain
phonemes and certain grammatical and semantic criteria. In English, /dh/
starts many function words and /th/ never does - so what? The phoneme /h/
(or the cluster /hw/, depending on the dialect) starts many interrogatives
(where, which, what, when) while /k/ never does - is this a reason to bunch
them together under one phoneme?

[snip]

[ JMcL wrote:]

>> [Me]
>> The distribution of /th/ and /dh/ cannot be determined by the
>> assignment of a PHONOLOGICAL rule.

> Let me see if I have your take on this straight.  Are you saying that
> allophones automatically become separate phonemes when the
> phonological conditioning environment that maintains their allophonic
> identity is lost?  And that they are phonemes even if they never
> contrast in an environment that can't be predicted, so long as the
> basis for predicting the environment is not phonological?

[GS]

Yes, that's how it should be. Once the conditioning factor is lost, we have
separate phonemes. German (+Swedish, Danish and Norwegian) umlauts, Southern
British /e@/ (bare, care) and French nasal vowels come to mind as examples.
You can probably invent a series of complex rules to eliminate these from
the inventories of phonemes, explain the exceptions as loanwords, analogies
or whatever, but what would be the purpose of this?

> Now if this is what you believe, I am not saying that it is wrong.  It
> is more a matter of how one sees the interaction of the various parts
> of language.  If the determination of phonemes is an entirely
> phonological process, then it is quite correct.  But if other areas
> or language can affect phonology, then it is not necessarily so.
> Again, it is a question of how much one area of language can affect
> the others.  A matter of where you draw your lines and how you make
> your definitions.

[snip]

> I just invented a phonological explanation for 'ether' - 'either' so
> it is no longer a minimal pair (just like Comanche [papi] and [pavi]
> aren't a minimal pair, although presumably these two words are both
> native in Comanche).  'Thigh' - 'thy' is just a historical accident.
> You say that synchronicity demands that [th] and [dh] be separate
> phonemes and that non-productive forms cannot be used for synchronic
> phonemicization and then you give me evidence based on loanwords and
> obsolete forms.  Not good enough.

To use someone else's analysis of Comanche as supporting evidence for your
analysis of English is not very convincing. If I analyzed Comanche, I would
probably accept the p/v contrast as phonemic, even if the contrast existed
only intervocally. I don't know Comanche, and I would be interested to hear
how it borrows words from English that begin with p- and v-, respectively.
Loans from Spanish are of lesser value, as /v/ does not exist in that
language.

It is quite common in language change for certain new phonemes to exist at
first only in specific environments. Subsequently, the new phoneme is
introduced into other environments by borrowing (from other languages or
from other dialects of the same language) or by processes other than the one
that gave rise to the new phoneme in the first place. Examples:

1. /v/, /z/, and /j/ in English. These phonemes arose from internal /f/, /s/
and /g > y/ in Old English under certain conditions (live, cheese, hedge),
and they were introduced initially later on in loanwords (very, zero, jet)
and from dialects (vat, vixen).

2. /b/, /d/ and /g/ in my native Hungarian. These phonemes are the natural
development of the Proto-Finno-Ugric (PFU) internal clusters /-mp-/, /-nt-/
and /-nk-/, respectively. On the other hand, they should not exist
initially, as there is no regular phonetic change that could produce them
from PFU etyma. Yet Hungarian is full of words beginning with voiced stops:
they are loanwords from Turkic, Slavic etc., and there are even a few words
of FU origin where initial *p- and *t- changed into *b- and *d- ("sporadic
sound change").

There exist as well curious cases where an allophone acquires phonemic
status ONLY because of the introduction of loanwords into a language. I am
thinking of Japanese, where the phoneme /h/ is pronounced as the voiceless
bilabial  fricative (normally denoted as the Greek letter phi, but let's
write it [ph] here) before the vowel  /u/ (the Hepburn transliteration is
used for the gloss, followed by a phonemic and phonetic transcription):
Fujimori /huzimori/ is pronounced [phujimori], fune /hune/ 'boat' is
[phune]. Nowadays, loanwords from English are introducing [ph] into
environments other than pre-/u/, e.g. ftku [pho:ku] 'fork', fairu [phairu]
'file'. According to my thinking, a new phoneme is being born in Japanese:
the next generation of speakers will not necessarily know that these are
"loanwords", so any phonetic rule based on their being loanwords will be
purely ad-hoc: the only reason for labelling some words as loanwords will be
in order to account for the presence of "unusual" occurrences of sounds like
[ph] not before /u/, [sh] before /e/ etc. It is better, IMHO, to allow for
the addition of new phonemes into the structure.

Best wishes to all,

Gabor Sandi
g_sandi at hotmail_com