Re: Love Those Double Vowels (was: Diving In...)

From: "Adam Walker" <dreamertwo@...>
>So there are several of them then.  English *does* have minimal pairs for
>/T/ and /D/.
>
>Thy / thigh
>Thin / then
>ether / either
>with her / wither
>
>Now, admitedly, thy is archaic, the second one depends on dialect, and the
>last one involves reduced speech, and even the third one probably doesn't
>contrast in many dialects, but for my dialect I found 4 mp's in about 5
>mins.
The problem I understand exists with the pair "thy/thigh" is that it occurs
across a morpheme boundary... The root is just [D] {th-} "second person singular
archaic", and inflects to "thou", "thee", "thy", "thine".  Because of this it
can't be a minimal pair unless you have another word that starts with a {th-}
[T] morpheme.  (Same problem with "with her" and "wither", only but more so.)

    *Muke!

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