Re: Allophones Question

On Tue, 2003-02-18 at 14:37, Quentin Read wrote:
> I was thinking about this: Does a language, if it has
> one side of a pair of allophones (voiced+unvoiced
> consonant) does it generally have the other or can
> they sometimes exist in isolation?  i.e., having sh
> without zh.  It seems that in English zh only exists
> rarely, in Latinate words, so was there a point in
> English in which there was sh and not zh?
'zh' is represented in X-Sampa as [Z]
'sh' is [S]. For more information, see
<http://www.i-foo.com/~kturtle/misc/xsamchart.gif> or
<http://www.conlanglinks.tk>.
slashes around a sound denote a phonemic representation.
brackets around a sound denote a phonetic representation (much more
precise).

Most definitely. During Old English (OE) there fricatives only had one
phonemic voicing (i.e. [f] and [v] were both /f/), but [S] was never
voiced, so the changes that made [f] and [v] two separate phonemes
couldn't act on /S/. And then when Middle English (ME) was borrowing
words from Anglo-Norman (and French generally) like there was no
tomorrow, there was no /Z/ for it to borrow (the French sound was then
pronounced [dZ]), and so for all of the OE and most if not all of the ME
period, there was no phoneme /Z/ (hence, there's no spelling for it in
Modern English (MnE)). You've probably worked out that most of the words
that have /Z/ in them in MnE derived from the combination /zj/ at one
point or another (e.g. vision /vIZ@n/ < /vIzj@n/, measure /meZ@(r)/ <
/mEzjur/).

Even now, /Z/ isn't as willing as /S/ to be shoved wherever it wants:
'garage' can be pronounced variously, with two options being /g@"ra:Z/
and /"g&ra:dZ/. Most other borrowings with /Z/ at the end of a word can
be pronounced with /dZ/. I understand some dialects even still don't
have /Z/, using /S/ for it most often (i.e. /eiS@/ for Asia).

So yeah. If you have a language without holes in its phonemes, don't
fret. It happens.