thy thigh etc.

[CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU]

On Tuesday Robert Whiting responded at great length to my post on the English
interdental fricatives, in which I attempted to draw some lessons from the
German non-distinction between [x] and [c,] in _Kuchen_ 'cake' vs. _Kuhchen_
'little cow', which I analyzed as /ku:x at n/ vs. /ku:+x at n/.  The gist of his
argument seems to be that if it is fair to use phonological boundaries (which
he identifies as always ultimately morphological boundaries), then it is also
fair to use morphological and lexical information to account for the
distribution of the intedental fricatives [T] and [D] in English.

He overlooks a significant difference between morphological -> phonological
boundaries and other types of morphological information: boundaries can be
located precisely between morphemes.  It is therefore to show them in
phonological representations, for their position (and type) seems to matter for
the phonetic realization.  But information such as "native/foreign" or
"content/function word" cannot be so located and cannot be described in any
real sense as "morphological", but rather as lexical and (for the latter, at
least) "syntactic".  There is no inconsistency in saying that boundaries are
phonologically relevant while other information is not.  (I do not mean to
imply that boundaries are *always* relevant while other information *never* is,
only that there is no inconsistency in treating them differently.)

A few other points: How did _thy_ and _thigh_ differ before the former
developed a voiced fricative?  Easy: the Old English forms were _thi:n_ and
_the:oh_, where the final -h represented a velar fricative.  The loss of the
final consonants in these words seems to be much later than the initial
voicing.

As the possibility of a three-way /ph : p : b/ contrast:  While I agree that
English speakers tend to hear unaspirated [p] as /b/ (at least, if the stop has
a lenis pronunciation; the fortis stops of the Romance languages are normally
perceived as /p/), systems with this contrast are by no means rare.  It was
found in ancient Greek and a variety of modern languages.  It could not *on
typological grounds* be ruled out for some future version of English.

And finally, I have read Chomsky & Halle.  Seems to me they thought that had
proved we didn't need phonemes to do phonology. and that various problems
(of the type to which the thy thigh controversy belongs) could be resolved if
we accepted "minor rules".  Well, that's very nice, but that's not the
framework in which we have been arguing, so I don't see why you invoked them.

Regards and peace

Leo A. Connolly                         Foreign Languages & Literatures
connolly at memphis.edu                    University of Memphis