Re: Graphemes defined

suzmccarth wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, John Cowan <cowan@...> wrote:
> > Michael Everson scripsit:
> >
> > > Seizure and (be)sieger?
> >
> > The context of my original remark appears to have been lost.
> Instances
> > of [Z] that are transparently derived from /zj/ are out of the
> case.
> > The issue is to find a contrast between [dZ] and [Z] where the
> latter
> > could *not* be analyzed as /zj/.
> >
> > The nearest thing to a minimal pair I've found so far in my
> idiolect is
> > page [dZ] and beige [Z].
>
> Yes - I realized later that I had not read the original context
> (about /zj/) and was only looking for both word final and
> intervocalic minimal pairs or approximations like beige and page.

See Gleason, Intro to Descriptive Linguistics (1961), 18f.:

"For /S/ : /Z/, minimal pairs are even rarer, and only the following are
known in my speech: dilution : delusion, glacier : glazier, and Aleutian
: allusion. ... In English /Z/ is a rare phoneme, and particularly so in
monosyllables. The author knows only three such words, loge, beige, and
rouge. The odds are against finding contrasts with only three words with
which to work."

Now, what was the original problem?
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...