Return of the minimal pairs

[pausyl at AOL.COM]

On Thu, 10 May 2001 18:19:04 +0100, Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
wrote:

>--On Sunday, May 6, 2001 2:29 pm +0300 Robert Whiting
><whiting at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:

>> To make it clear what my statement was about:  My entire point was that
>> [T] and [D] do not contrast in initial position in English.  My
>> statement was not about whether [T] and [D] are phonemes in English or
>> not.  The two are not necessarily related ([T] and [D] can still be
>> phonemes even if they don't contrast in some environments).

>OK; I'll bite.  I will argue that [T] and [D] *do* contrast in initial
>position in English.  It is merely that we happen to have no good minimal
>pairs for /T/ and /D/ in the language at present -- a completely different
>matter.

>To begin with, 'thigh' and 'thy' are a perfect minimal pair, *if* we accept
>that 'thy' is a word of modern English -- which you may not want to accept.

>But there are a number of near-minimal pairs:

[ moderator snip ]

>By the way, is everybody happy that 'thus' is beyond question a grammatical
>word, and not a lexical word?

I'm actually on Larry Trask's side (for the most part) in this discussion,
but I assume that the argument from Robert Whiting's side would be best
stated in terms of "closed-class" vs. "open-class" words; _thus_ would seem
to be in the closed class.  _thy_ is surely English (think of the "Lord's
Prayer"), but it's also a closed-class item.  And I would judge the
Traskian point above about /oi/ never occurring in native English words,
even if true, to be irrelevant to the discussion:  It seems to me that no
amount of introspection would help an intelligent (but linguistically
untrained) native speaker of English to decide that _boy_ (the etymology of
which is disputed) is a loanword; however, it seems plausible that that
same speaker could uncover the fact that all words beginning with /D/
are "closed-class" or the like.  Whether all this is relevant to the
phonemicity of /D/ vs. /T/ is a completely different argument, however.  If
we take that same "intelligent (but linguistically untrained) native
speaker of English" as our judge again, it's clear that a minimal pair
like "either" vs. "ether" would establish the phonemic distinction.

>Take another case.  It is extremely difficult to find minimal pairs for
>[esh] and [ezh] in *any* position -- and all the pairs I can think of
>involve involve either proper names of foreign origin or obscure Scrabble
>words.

The best pair I could come up with is _Confucian_ (with [esh]) vs.
_confusion_ (with [ezh]).

Paul S. Cohen