Return of the minimal pairs

Douglas G. Wilson douglas at nb.net
Mon Jun 4 02:27:26 UTC 2001


>... they don't don't much affect the Engish initial [T] - [D] situation.

"Dhal" and "duinhewassel" were my "contributions". I don't claim any
particular effect. But I think Larry Trask's point was that English would
accommodate adopted lexical words beginning in /D/ -- or perhaps even
"native" words, although I can't think of any -- and these are valid
examples using what I think is a reasonable criterion (inclusion in
dictionaries). If it is "arbitrary" which words appear in a dictionary, I
guess it isn't a very good dictionary ... and I will submit that the
dictionary criterion is much less arbitrary than one which refers to
whether or not a word elicits a derogatory response from one or another of
the esteemed scholars subscribing to a certain list. "Dhal" is from the
Random House Unabridged (RHUD), the other word from Webster's Second (M-W).
If my criterion is considered unsatisfactory, one should attack the
criterion and propose an improved one rather than making special objections
for each proposed word: for example, one could assert that only the OED is
a valid reference, or that only words correctly pronounced by a majority of
a standard sample of 8-year-olds should be permitted, or that only those
words having an indisputable reflex in Old English are "English words".

>... If this makes it an English sound, so then are all the names of Arabic
>letters English sounds.

By my criterion, these letter-names are all English words if they're all in
a standard English dictionary. I haven't checked them all.

>Since other alphabets have names for their letters as well, then all the
>sounds that these alphabets represent become English sounds simply by
>including them in an English dictionary.

No. I refer to words (i.e., dictionary entries), not "sounds". I believe
that the RHUD, for example, includes Greek letter-names (but not, e.g.,
Thai letter-names) for a reason ... although one is free to disagree with
the reasoning. Apparently at least some Arabic letter-names are English
words by my criterion, since they're in the RHUD. Note that the RHUD does
not include "delta" with /D/; it shows the English pronunciation only ...
but for "dhal" only /Dal/ is shown (thus this is an English pronunciation
by my criterion!).

>... And no English speaker who doesn't speak Arabic would ever pronounce
>'dhal' with [D] unless he looked it up in the dictionary.

The majority of the words in the English language are unknown to me, and I
wouldn't be sure how to pronounce any of these unknown words except by
looking in a dictionary. In some cases I would make a guess, but not in
this one. Some might be more willing than I to make a guess, but I would
not like to think that the English language is defined ONLY by the wild
guesses of the ignorant and careless.

>... So 'dhal' is no more of an English word than 'ghayn' is despite the
>fact that the former is in the dictionary as an entry and the latter only
>appears in the table of alphabets.

The same dictionary showing "dhal" also shows the entry "ghain" /Rein/.

>... (otherwise English has to have a phoneme [x] as in 'loch' contrasting
>with 'lock').

And it does, according to my judgement. That's why I pronounce "loch" with
/x/ when speaking English (and at least some of the dictionaries support me
in this). Are Scots words English words? Referring again to my criterion,
at least some of them are: those which are in the English dictionaries. [I
might not argue too strongly against the proposition that they all are ....]

>This is really scraping the bottom of a very shallow barrel.

True. If there were hundreds of common lexical items beginning with /D/,
the discussion would never have occurred. Perhaps someone has a better
example than "dhal" or whatever that other monstrosity was ....

-- Doug Wilson



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