Return of the minimal pairs

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Whiting" <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2001 1:17 PM

[snip]
> What you need to establish your point is not answers to questions like
> "What would the world be like if Napoleon had conquered Russia?" but an
> example of an initial [D] in English that is not a deictic or a pronoun
> (i.e., does not begin with the pronominal/deictic morpheme).  It doesn't
> even have to contrast with a word with initial [T].  Any word that begins
> with [D] in which the [D] is not a morpheme would be sufficient to justify
> your claim that the fact that all words in English that begin with [D] are
> pronouns or deictics is mere coincidence and that the distribution of
> initial [T] and [D] is not predictable by any phonological rule.

>> By the way, is everybody happy that 'thus' is beyond question a grammatical
>> word, and not a lexical word?

> I have no problem with 'thus'.  It is as much a grammatical word as
> 'hence' or 'so', and it is clearly a deictic.  I have more problem with
> 'though' as a deictic, which I think is a borderline case.

[snip]

[Ed Selleslagh]

I totally agree with you. But I don't think you have to distinguish deictics
and pronouns beginning with the morpheme (not phoneme) [D]: the pronouns
involved have or had a deictic meaning, just like the definite article.

Note that in Dutch, probably the closest relative of English, all these words
begin with [d] (< IE /t/) (Dutch doesn't have interdental fricatives). That
includes 'though', Du. cognate: 'doch' [dox] (meaning something like 'but',
'nonetheless' in slightly elevated style). Ditto for 'thus', Du. '(al)dus'. But
Dutch also has preserved 'toch' [tox], meaning something like 'nonetheless'
(normal and colloquial): bizarre, isn't it?

In Latin, the corresponding deictic morpheme is [t], like in 'tantum', 'talis'
etc...(Interrogative <qu>, Eng. <wh>, also a morpheme in both languages).

The American confusion about the initial consonant of 'thither' is most likely
due to a lack of familiarity with the old bases (archaic usages) of the
language. It is just as deictic as 'there', an extremely common word, about
which there is no doubt at all in the mind of any English speaker, even
non-native.

Virtually all of this is common knowledge, but I thought it was a useful
reminder that there is nothing mysterious about this deictic morpheme, as
opposed to the theta of lexical words, which is just a consonant (with possibly
postion-determined allophonic pronunciations) belonging to the root or one of
the roots in compounds, or to another, non-deictic, morpheme like the -th in
e.g. 'length', Du. 'lengte'. Note the t in Dutch.

Ed.