Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut)

[Stanley Friesen]

At 07:08 PM 11/4/00 +0200, Robert Whiting wrote:
>On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, David L. White wrote:

><snip>

>> For English /th/ vs/ /dh/, the question to ask is something like "In a
>> story where two brothers were named "Lith" and "Lidh", would an
>> audience be able to keep them apart?"  The answer is clearly yes,
>> regardless of the various other consideration that some have noted,
>> therefore the distinction is (not surprisingly) phonemic.

>No, the answer is:  if there were two brothers named Lith and Lidh then
>the distinction would be phonemic.  As long as there aren't, there is
>no phonemic distinction.  It doesn't matter that the two sounds are
>capable of being distinct phonemes.  ...

Actually David has a good point (at least if you make it a play rather than
a story to be read).  Try writing a Japanese play with characters named
Shil and Shir.  The result will be confusion and incomprehension.  Or try
an English play with characters named Lit and Lit' (where /'/ represents
aspiration, since we are already using /th/ to mean voiceless interdental
fricative).  You will get the same result.  And this is despite the fact
that both the pair /r/ and /l/ and the pair /t/ and /t'/ *can* be
distinguished, since some languages do exactly that.

The the fact that an non-specialist native speaker can *hear* the
difference is good reason to consider it to be phonemic.

>And as you unintentionally point out, when they become phonemes, [dh]
>will have to be written <dh>,

Not at all.  The natural spelling of /lidh/ in English would be Lihthe or
something like that (If "lithe" did not already exist with a long 'i', that
would be the spelling)

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