minimal pairs are not always there

[Stanley Friesen]

At 05:40 PM 11/6/00 +0200, Robert Whiting wrote:

>On Wed, 26 Apr 2000 Gábor Sándi <g_sandi at hotmail.com> wrote:
>yourself a question:  If the phoneme /b/ occurs in an English
>word, what does that tell you about the meaning of that word?
>The answer should be:  "absolutely nothing."

Seems reasonable, though perhaps a bit overstated.  There are plenty of
words with some sort of sound-symbolism involving perfectly good phonemes
to make this too strong a statement.  (And I do not just mean onomatopoeia).

>In the pair ether/either, 'ether' belongs to a class of words
>where the pronunciation of <th> as [th] is required (by rule
>based on a clearly established pattern [Greek loans originally
>containing theta]);

I disagree. I do not respond to any such rule in my own listening.  No such
rule governs any pattern in my speech production.  As far as I am aware, I
just memorized the word 'ether' as such.

>  'either' belongs to a class of words where
>the pronunciation of <th> as [dh] is required (by rule based on a
>clearly established pattern [native words with an intervocalic
>spirant where the original voiceless spirant was voiced by
>rule]).

Ditto.

>   Since the respective pronunciations of these words are
>required by rule, this cannot be a phonemic distinction because
>the choice of these sounds is not arbitrary.

It is in MY speech.  And I doubt many other English speakers could be shown
to have even a subliminal awareness of any such rules.

>Greek word with theta doesn't make any difference.  There must be
>some synchronic rule that forces this [th] pronunciation or else
>the pattern wouldn't be there in the language synchronically.

Not at all - there is such a thing as a *relictual* pattern. one that is
left over from prior history, but which has no *current* linguistic
significance.  The only evidence I would accept for a synchronic rule is
evidence from the speech behavior of native speakers.  The mere existence
of a pattern is not, by itself, sufficient to establish a rule.

The very fact that having characters names Lith and Lihthe(/lidh/) is
*comprehensible* in English shows that English speakers *perceive* the two
sounds as being semantically arbitrary.  If they did not, then someone
hearing such a pair of names would necessarily attempt to interpret them
according to the supposed rules, and thus have a difficult time hearing
them as a pair of names.  Instead they would hear two words in different
categories, as required by the rules.

>to be pronounced with [dh].  There is nothing arbitrary about the
>choice of [th] and [dh]; these pronunciations are required by
>rule, therefore the contrast is not phonemic.

The pronunciations are "required" by *historical* rules that are no longer
active.

In my speech I have merely learned the two words by rote.  I apply no rules
to determine their pronunciation.

>smuggled into phonology.  So it is not a matter of "no
>nonphonetic conditioning factors," it is a matter of how much
>morphological conditioning you are willing to allow into
>phonology.

As little as possible to still produce a coherent theory of a given language.

I.e., apply Occam's Razor here.  Do not postulate an entity - in this case
a particular type of morphological conditioning - unless it is *necessary*
to explain the facts. You might also call this the KISS principle.

>My own answer to this tends to be "as much as you can."

Then here is the fundamental disagreement.  I prefer to minimize special
handling, not maximize it.

>> Take two of your examples above:

>> /ng/ - not a phoneme. We can analyze it as the allophone of /n/
>> before /k/ and /g/. /g/ is then dropped ("zero allophone" - why
>> not?)

Because it is *simpler* to treat it as a phoneme?

[Though in this case there is actually a reasonable argument for allophonic
status, given its *very* limited distribution - and the fact that trying to
use /ng/ to coin arbitrary new words results in words that do not sound
like English].

>before the agentive suffix '-er'.  Stem-final /g/ goes to zero
>immediately and (nearly) all derivative suffixes (agentive '-er',
>'-ing', '-ish', '-ly', '-y', etc.) are added to this base.  All
>that is needed then is a rule that triggers the restoration of
>/g/ before the comparative '-er' (and for completeness, ...

I would prefer to reorder the rules so that the comparative suffix is added
prior to the application of the rule that deletes the /g/.  I do not like
rules that restore.

>All things considered then, it is probably simpler to operate
>with /n/ and /ng/ as different phonemes because this does not
>require the zero allophone of /g/ to maintain their allophonic
>status *and* there is no indication of a morphophonemic
>alternation between [n] and [ng]

The main problem with that is that this supposed phoneme cannot be used
arbitrarily.  A made-up 'ngib' is NOT a possible English word contrasting
with 'nib'.  [Interestingly, when playing with this "word" I tended to
"hear" it as 'gib' (hard 'g') - which supports a 'silent g' interpretation].

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com