From: G&P
Message: 61202
Date: 2008-11-02
> Right, there is a sound like [w] in French,
> now the issue is : what is its status ?
It is not uncommon for different analyses of a language to make slightly different decisions about what is or is not a phoneme. Contrastive pairs are not enough; it all depends whether the segments are re-analysed as an allophone of something else.
For example, not many people suggest that English has the phoneme [ç] (that’s the German ich-laut, in case the symbol doesn’t appear properly), but the sound certainly occurs, and in contrastive pairs (e.g. hue and who). Should it be a phoneme, or not? More significantly for me, some linguists won’t accept voiceless [W] as a phoneme, but in my dialect it undeniably is.
So a debate about whether a sound is or is not a phoneme is probably not about the sound at all, or about the language, but about the choice of analysis.
Peter