From: "Harald Hammarstrom" <
haha2581@...>
To: <
cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, July 05, 2003 4:07 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Abstractness (Was Re: [j] v. [i])
> It's not watertight only because you require the two words in the pair
> to be existant in the language. How many English people wouldn't say
> that hang and zhang are two different words even though zhang doesn't
> mean anything in English. With this criterion we wouldn't have the
> mismatch between the "intuitive" phonematic status of [h] vs [Z] and
> the minimal pair test. Not so?
I gave Piotr the contrast 'ha! ha!' versus 'Zsa Zsa' long ago. However, I
am currently being undermined by an advertising campaing based on the
children's program Hector's House. It has a dog called Hector, a frog
called Kiki (who speaks with a French accent!) and Zsa Zsa the cat. But Zsa
Zsa is being pronounced not [ZAZA] but [zAzA]. The dictionaries will tell
you that 'zo' is pronounced [Z&u] (or something similar - the vowel is not
relvant here). I strongly suspect that most people who know the word
pronounce it [z&u], though I don't know what the statistics would be for
people who know what it means (and I *don't* mean 30 points for a triple
word score in scrabble). It's unstable in English in initial position
because such words are not in the core vocabulary and do not have a well
recognised spelling. The instability is part of why Piotr refers to a
defective distribution. The other is that /h/ only occurs naturally at the
start of an initial or stressed syllable.
(The /h/ in an initial unstressed syllable is maintained by a social
shibboleth - it's traditionally missing in lower class Southern English
British English. I'll save Torsten the bother, and mention that he goes to
town on shibboleths at
http://www.anglefire.com/rant/tgpedersen/Shibbolethisation.html )
Richard.