John Cowan wrote:

> If it comes to that, there are well-known varieties of English in
> which one may well doubt that /Z/ exists either: it is either a
> realization of /zj/, or a mere component of a unitary affricate
> phoneme /dZ<ligature>/.

One wonders if such a phoneme exists in *any* variety of English...

Diachronically, [ˈplɛʒə(ɾ)] comes from M.E. *[ˈplezjur], which in turn comes
from French [plezyr]; synchronically, there is no [zj] cluster in English
(probably not even across words boundaries, such as in "jaZZ You").

if [ʒ] is a phoneme, why aren't the [ɲ] and [ʎ] which I think I am hearing
at the beginning of words such as "Nuke" or "Luke".

_ Marco