minimal pairs

[Stanley Friesen]

At 02:59 PM 10/15/00 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote:

>But scythe is quite regular, the OE form being 'si:the' and hence
>the <th> is intervocalic and should have gone to [dh].  My
>pronunciation, however, is [sai] and hence is homophonous with
>'sigh'.

Fascinating.  Mine is the "expected" [saidh] - both as a verb and a noun.

>'Swathe' (or 'swath') as a noun meaning "(like) a path cut with a
>scythe" is difficult because it is mixed up with an unrelated
>verb 'swathe' "to wrap, bind" (connected with 'swaddle').

Which my dialect has resolved by losing the verb.

>It is quite true that nouns in /-Vth/ can be used as verbs
>without any change.  What we have here is the productive rule of
>verb formation (NOUN --> VERB  / ...) coming into conflict with
>the markedness rule for verb formation (final spirant voicing
>rule).

The problem I have here is that, at least in my dialect, that latter rule
is no longer productive (in the sense of "used to spontaneously form new
words").  Nobody I know would expect to be able to create a verb by this
means that would be *understood* as such (except by context).

>this will be a phonemic distinction. So long as one verb or the
>other can have either pronunciation, the distinction is not
>phonemic.

Here I disagree - I would treat most such pairs either as synonymous words
that happen to be similar, or as dialectal variants.  This would only rule
out phoneme status if *all* such pairs had identical meanings.  If even a
*few* show different meanings based on the difference in pronunciation,
then that is sufficient to establish phoneme status.

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