minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut)

[Richard M. Alderson III]

On Wed, 29 Mar 2000, Pat Ryan (proto-language at email.msn.com) wrote, responding
to Larry Trask's post of Tue, 28 Mar 2000:

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

> [LT]

>> Easy.  English /h/ and [eng] -- the velar nasal, as in 'sing' -- do not
>> form even a single minimal pair.

> [PR]

> Now I am really confused. I would have thought that /h/ could be established
> by many minimal pairs like [her] / [per] and /ng/ by many minimal pairs like
> [bang] / [ban], along the lines of your dictionary's: "The existence of such
> a pair demonstrates conclusively that the two segments which are different
> must belong to two different phonemes."

Of course they are established by those minimal pairs--but there is no minimal
pair involving *those* *two* *phonemes*.

In rabid American Structuralist writings, complementary distribution of two
apparent phonemes required that they be combined into a single phoneme with
two (or more) allophones--until it was pointed out that in English, [h] and [N]
were in complementary distribution ([h] only occurs word-initially, [N] word-
medially and -finally), and otherwise fit the minimal-pair requirement for
phonemehood, as you yourself note.  This led to the _ad hoc_ creation of the
requirement for "phonetic similarity" among all the allophones of a phoneme.
(I think Twaddell wrote that position paper--it's in Joos, _Readings in
Linguistics_, in any case.)

NB:  It's "phonetic", not "phonological", similarity that is required in this
phonological theory.

								Rich Alderson