Doug Ewell scripsit:

> Regardless of origin, I would consider anyone who actually pronounces
> "vision" as /vIzj@.../ or "measure" as /mEzj@.../ to be speaking an
> unusually stilted dialect of English.

The point is not that anyone says [vIzj@...], but that a certain degree
of theoretical neatness is achieved by treating the underlying form as
/vIzj@.../ and adding a phonological rule that realizes /zj/ as [Z].
Note carefully the distribution of slashes and brackets here.

These things change over time, to be sure; [S] once appeared only as
one realization for /sk/ or /tj/, but over the course of time minimal
pairs like "shirt" and "skirt", "dish" and "disk" (often, as in these
cases, of the same ultimate origin) have arisen, and the phonemic
status of /S/ is now perfectly clear. The same is not true of /Z/.

A few other such possibilities (without falling over the cliff into
extreme Chomsky/Halleism): assuming that "strong" and "long" have
underlying forms ending in /Ng/, as shown by "stronger" and "longer",
even though realized as [N] finally; treating the range of Chinese
vowels as underlyingly only /a/, /@/, and zero, with possible on-glides
and off-glides of /j/, /w/, /H/, and zero.

--
John Cowan jcowan@... www.ccil.org/~cowan www.reutershealth.com
Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic
realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers,
philologists, psychologists, biologists and neurologists, along with
whatever blood can be got out of grammarians. - Russ Rymer