Return of the minimal pairs

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Leo A. Connolly" <connolly at memphis.edu>
Sent: Monday, May 21, 2001 7:36 AM

> On May 17 Robert Whiting wrote, among other things, concering the
> thy:thigh question:

>>   The fact that initial [D] occurs only in
>> function or grammatical (or closed-class) words is not what keeps initial
>> [T] and [D] from contrasting in English.  What keeps them from contrasting
>> is the fact that initial [D] in English is always a morpheme.

> I beg your pardon?  If [D-] is a morpheme, then _thy_, _this_, _then_
> etc. must consist of at least two morphemes each.  If _thy_ matches
> _thou_ and _thee_, or _then_ matches _when?_, what does _though_ match?
> How could _though_, or _thus_, have more than one morpheme?

> Leo Connolly

[Ed Selleslagh]

[D-] most certainly IS a morpheme or, maybe better, as Larry Trask puts it, a
marker - even though its older form was probably something more like [Di:],
[De] or [D@]. It is, IMHO, a deictic prefix (or marker), just like <wh-> is a
interrogative one (Latin t- and qu-).

However, not all - initial or otherwise - [D]'s are equal: some have a
different origin, like in <thou> etc., which don't belong to the same 'closed
class'. As far as I can judge, <either> etc. belong to still another class. It
seems to me that lumping them all together in one class is a purely an
empirical and practical way of describing the present state of the language,
where the different origins are not readily visible any longer, at least not to
the 'naive' speaker. But I'm sure any better IE-ist than me (easy to find!) can
show you the various origins of these different classes.

In <thus> we have a deictic [D], since it means 'in THIS way'. Its match is
<how>, the initial h being the relict of the interrogative prefix/marker.

The fact that <though> doesn't have and probably never had a match (e.g. with
<wh->) shows that it belongs to another class.

Ed.