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.

Right. So according to Piotr:
(1) [Z] and [h] have defective distributions in native Eng. words
(2) They are "intuitively" phonemes
(3) The minimal-pair test is not foolproof

Of course, I don't challenge (1). I don't challenge (2) either since
I believe English speakers do perceive a difference e.g in foreign words.
It's then better to devise a slightly different minimal-pair test that
will be foolproof by only requiring one of the words in the pair to have
a meaning in English (or whatev. language). It then doesn't rely on
coincidences on which words happen to be in the language. What if in 10
years zsa zsa (with the [ZAZA] pronounciation), due to heavy commercials,
becomes a word in English with the generic meaning 'cat'. Would we then
suddenly say, Oh now [Z] is a phoneme in English?

best wishes,

Harald