Return of the minimal pairs

[Robert Whiting]

On Thu, 24 May 2001, Larry Trask wrote:

> --On Sunday, May 20, 2001 6:11 am -0400 "Douglas G. Wilson"
> <douglas at nb.net> wrote:

>> Just a footnote, not intended to invalidate the point about initial /D/.

>> Are there "non-grammatical" English words beginning with /D/?

>> I will take as a working definition of "English word": "any word which
>> appears in a conventional English-language dictionary, excluding proper
>> names". I also exclude pronunciations which are designated as foreign, if
>> an alternative "English" pronunciation is given.

>> I find two:

>> "dhal" /Dal/ (an Arabic letter);

>> "duinhewassel" /DIn at was@l/ (a Scots designation of minor nobility, variant
>> of "duniewassal").

>> Marginal examples, true ... slightly better perhaps than the imaginary
>> river dhelta.

> Ah, splendid, and many thanks.  These words are not in my desk dictionary,
> and I didn't know them -- and me a Scrabble-player, too.  I happen to know
> that 'dhal' is legal in British tournament Scrabble in another sense.  I
> don't know if the second is, but I don't suppose I'll ever get a chance to
> play it anyway.  Can't recall the last time I played a 12-letter word.

Not quite so fast, Larry.  These may be splendid for your scrabble
strategy, but they don't don't much affect the Engish initial [T] - [D]
situation.

The definition of 'dhal' as "(an Arabic letter)" does not tell the story.
It is not the name of any Arabic letter, but it is the name of the letter
that represents the sound [D].  As such it fills the same ecological niche
as English 'edh'.  So 'dhal', despite its lack of capitalization is the
name of a specific person, place, or thing); it is the name of the symbol
used to represent the sound [D] in Arabic.  If this makes it an English
sound, so then are all the names of Arabic letters English sounds.  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.  You can use 'dhal' in scrabble because it
is in the English dictionary and it is not capitalized, just as you can
use 'psi' and 'xi' in scrabble, but that doesn't mean that they affect
English phonology except in a very peripheral way.

And no English speaker who doesn't speak Arabic would ever pronounce
'dhal' with [D] unless he looked it up in the dictionary.  It would
simply be pronounced with [d] because that is how English <dh> in
initial position is reallized.  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.  Its
inclusion is completely arbitrary.

As for 'duinhewassel', OED seems to have missed this pronunciation,
although they have the spelling.  I wouldn't be surprised that this
comes from Chamber's which is well known for its Scottish bias.  But
the word is Gaelic in origin where initial [d] and [D] vary depending
on the phonetic environment (external sandhi).  Scots dialects can't
really be used to define English phonology (otherwise English has to
have a phoneme [x] as in 'loch' contrasting with 'lock').

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

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi