Re: Allophone Problem

Joseph Fatula wrote:
> I'm having a problem analyzing the phonemes of a language.  The sound
> [e] only appears before voiceless consonants, while [i] can appear in
> any other environment.  This leads me to think that they're allophones
> of each other, except for the following problem.  Voiceless fricatives
> become voiced between vowels, yet the [e] in such cases remains unchanged:
>
>    - [nef] > [neva]
>    - [niv] > [niva]
>
> Among words with the "-a" suffix, this [e] vs. [i] distinction is the
> only thing showing the difference between words like [neva] and [niva].
> Are these minimal pairs?  Are [e] and [i] separate phonemes?
I’d say no. I quick example that I think’s comparable from my dialect of
English:

Amongst others, I have two sounds in my dialect of English, which I
shall denote (in spite of the phonetics): [i:\] and [i:]; [:\] is the
half colon (ˑ) that denotes a half-long vowel. The shorter one only
occurs before voiceless sounds, the later in other environments. Hence:

  - beat   [bi:\t]
  - beed   [bi:d]
  - leak   [li:\k]
  - league [li:g]

However, [t] is voiced and both [t] and [d] are flapped between a vowel
and an unstressed vowel:

  - hurt [h2:t] ~ hurting [h2:4IN]
  - gird [g2:d] ~ girding [g2:4IN]

This process does not alter the length of the previous vowel, even when
it was phonetically conditioned:

  - beat [bi:\t] ~ beated [bi:\4@d]
  - beed [bi:d]  ~ beeded [bi:4@d]

My dialect does otherwise have a regular phonemic contrast of length
between other vowel pairs (e.g. "hut" [hat] "heart" [ha:t], "pull" [pu5]
"pool" [pu:5]), so a distinction could be made, but the only reason I'm
aware of it is because of my linguistic background.

HTH,
--
Tristan.