"fission" with -zh-?

[Barbara Need]

And is identical with fishin'?

I remember learning fission and fishin' as a minimal pair in some
early linguistics class.

Barbara

Barbara Need
Etna, NY

On 15 Mar 2011, at 9:37 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:

> Yes, we few but happy and pretentious few.  For
> me "fission" is "mission", not "vision", so that
> "fusion" ['fyuZn] is two pairs away from "fission".
>
> Joel
>
> At 3/15/2011 08:25 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>> At 4:05 PM -0400 3/15/11, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>>> "Fizhion" is what they've been saying on the news for years and
>>> years. I
>>> suppose some still say "fission," but they must be a real minority.
>>>
>>> JL
>>
>> We're a proud minority, we happy few.  Besides,
>> we can pun on "Gone Fission", which those fizhion
>> folks can't.
>>
>> LH
>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 3:58 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>> On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 4:22 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu
>>>> >
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> At 12:11 PM -0700 3/15/11, geoffrey nunberg wrote:
>>>>>> Listening to some nuclear energy experts talking about Japan on
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> radio this morning, I was led to wonder whether  "fission" is
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> only English word in which orthographic [Vssion] can be
>>>>>> pronounced
>>>>>> with a voiced fricative. When I checked with my graduate
>>>>>> students, I
>>>>>> was surprised to find that that's the pronunciation used by all
>>>>>> but
>>>>>> one of them (and the one is from S. Africa). If so, it must be by
>>>>>> analogy with "fusion," right?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Geoff
>>>>>>
>>>>> So I've always assumed, as with the shift from penult to ult
>>>>> stress
>>>>> in "covert" on the model of "overt". Â Something there is that
>>>>> likes a
>>>>> minimal pair. Â (Then there's the pronunciation of "transition" to
>>>>> rhyme with "incision"...)
>>>>>
>>>>> LH
>>>>
>>>> Are speakers of BrE still under the impre[Z]ion that "equation" is
>>>> pronounced "equa[S]ion"?

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