"fission" with -zh-?

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:34 PM -0400 3/15/11, Barbara Need wrote:
>And is identical with fishin'?
>
>I remember learning fission and fishin' as a minimal pair in some
>early linguistics class.
>
>Barbara

Based on the contrast between [@] in the former
and [I] or barred-i in the latter, as in "Rosa's"
vs. "roses" (from Gleason's Intro to Descriptive
Linguistics)?  My problem was that I could never
really believe in contrasts resulting from the
difference between two unstressed vowels.

LH

>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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