Re: CHAT: Phonemic status of English interdentals

In a message dated 10/9/02 12:56:52 AM, morg0072@FLINDERS.EDU.AU writes:

>Tristan wrote:
>
>> Much easier to tell the difference between [&] and [&:] (which only
>> have one debatable minimal pair---can and can)
>
>1. "banner" (one who bans) vs "banner" (flag)
>
>2. "banning" (participle of ban) / "Banning" (surname of former South
>   Australian premier.
I also have "have" vs. "halve", which are on the same level as "can" and
"can". Then there are more dubious ones like "shall" vs. "shale", "Val"
(short for Valerie) vs. "veil", "gal" vs. "gale", etc.

About the interdentals - I guess it's one of those things that makes you
think things are really on a continuum rather than being absolutely one or
the other. They're phonemes in the sense that many people can hear the
difference and "feel" that they are different, and even people who claim they
can't hear the difference will pronounce them correctly - i.e., they will
used the voiced one in certain words and the voiceless one in other words,
and not dependent on some phonetic condition. On the other hand, there are
few if any good minimal pairs, they can sometimes be interchanged, and people
often can't tell the difference on demand (this may be due to the lack of
minimal pairs and the fact that they are neither written differently nor
[usually, at least, I assume] taught as distinct sounds in school, whereas
other phonemes are). So maybe on a scale of phonemes to non-phonemes, they're
somewhere in the middle. Maybe one day they will completely merge into /T/.


Josh Roth
http://members.aol.com/fuscian/home.html

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