Talk:Minimal pair

message: I deleted the reference to Norwegian and Serbo-Croatian as Tonal_languages to de-emphasize the prominence. Indeed the page on Norwegian mentions tone but mainly prosodic as in other European languages, whereas the article on Serbo-Croatian doesn't mention it at all. On the other side most African languages use tone to a significant extent. Hirzel 14:52, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tonal distinction 

message: The transcription of Hebrew and one of the tables for Thai is orthographic rather than in IPA. Please apply IPA to all transcriptions, or it will be hard for those who aren't familiar with the language to understand the differences between the pronunciation. With IPA one will at least have a chance of getting it right.
Peter Isotalo 20:12, 9 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  IPA for all transcriptions 

message: Many of the recent additions on limitations of minimal pairs seem to be based on a misunderstanding of minimial pairs (e.g. the bit about other information is not relevant to determining the phonemes of a language; if it is regarded as a problem, it must go in Phoneme, because it is a problem of that concept not a tool used to determine the number). Perhaps I merely misunderstand the objection, in which case a reply and an expansion will make me happy.
More significantly, I think they need to be cited. I'm adding an Unreferencedsect template to it.
—Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 14:29, 30 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Additions on limitations 

message: The use of minimal pairs to determine phonemes does have its issues. Such a method has the profound weakness of circular logic: phonemes are used to delimit the semantic realm of language (lexical or higher level meaning), but semantic means (minimal pairs of words, such as 'light' vs. 'right' or 'pay' vs. 'bay') are then used to define the phonological realm. 
Moreover, if phonemes and minimal pairs were such a precise tool, why would they result in such large variations of the sound inventories of languages (such as anywhere from 40-48 phonemes for counts of English)? Also, it is the case that most words (regardless of homophones like 'right' and 'write', or minimal pairs like 'right' and 'light')differentiate meaning on much more information than a contrast between two sounds.
Still yet another weakness is the very notion of 'minimal'. Minimal pairs of words often, upon closer phonetic analysis, contrast through more than one difference (so the term 'minimal pair' is itself a misnomer). For example, if we break phonemes down further into features, we can differentiate words that are supposed to contrast by one phoneme pair by more than one distinctive feature; however, features have proven even more difficult to delimit than phonemes but some demonstrably spread beyond one segment (which again confounds the very commonly held concept of the phoneme modelling and capturing phonology as a unified sound).
A final possibly fatal flaw of the minimal pair concept is that it is predicated on a psychological phenomemon called 'categorical perception', but categorical perception has been demonstrated as existing as an auditory phenomenon not exclusive to language, which problematizes it as a concept to use in determing a basic phonological unit for language processing and language acquisition.
:The above may well be true, but should be formulated in an encyclopedic style, not as a retoric complaint. Perhaps it should also be moved to the Phoneme article. −Woodstone 21:23, 30 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Limitations and flaws of the minimal pair concept and method 

message: I've been told that minimal pairs can be made not only between words with distinct meaning, but between one word with a meaning, and a word without meaning. For example, if "abc" has one meaning, and "xbc" has no meaning, then "abc" and "xbc" are minimal pairs, and consequently "a" and "x" are phonemes, even if there are no minimal pairs of "a" and "x" where both words have meaning. Is that correct? Should the introduction of the article be changed to reflect that? Nikola 13:36, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: By definition for something to be a word it has to have a meaning (no matter how vague). There can be a sequence of letters, that is not a word, but there is no meaningful way of establishing its pronunciation, except by following to analogies to words that do exist. So using those non-words to define phonemes would lead to a circular reasoning, which does not lead to valid linguistic results. &minusWoodstone 09:50, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Would you come to Talk:Montenegrin language#New phonemes and leave your comments, because there is dispute about that? Nikola 19:15, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Introduction

message: The Russian language example  in 'Differentiating stress' section is bad or even invalid: the vowel 'u' is almost irreducible in normal speech. I would suggest an example with stressed/unstressed 'o', which perfectly and notably reduces to schwa and even to 'a', kind of doroga or some other, simpler word I cannot think of right now.  mikka (t) 21:31, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Russian language

message: The Hebrew examples in 'Differentiating consonants' are erroneous.  These examples are from a reconstructed stage of medieval Hebrew, for which many of the details of pronunciation are uncertain, so they're not a very good choice for illustrating phonetic and phonological ideas.  (Sure, they clarify the ideas, even if the facts are dubious, but why not clarify the ideas and at the same time use facts that are reliably accurate?!)  
As for the details, */qɔːrɔːʔ/ never existed.  This is so for two reasons:  First, because at a time when the /ʔ/ was still pronounced (before /ʔ/ in syllable codas was dropped) the vowel /a/ in general had probably not lengthened to /aː/ and /aː/ had not yet shifted to /ɔː/, so this word was /qaraʔ/ or /qaːraʔ/, and second, if the /ʔ/ was still pronounced as a consonant in such a word the vowel before it would be /a/, just as in the other examples, and not /ɔː/.  So /qaraʔ/ surely existed at an early stage, and later on /qaːraʔ/, and possibly /qɔːraʔ/, but surely */qɔːrɔːʔ/ never existed.  Also, 'to see' was probably /lirʔoːθ/ with a short /i/, so there were two differences in the pronunciation of 'to see' and 'to shoot'. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 129.49.217.85 (talk) 16:59, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Hebrew language

message: :English "let" + "lit" proves that phones  and  do in fact represent distinct phonemes  and .
No, it doesn't. It simply proves that the two do not have the same underlying representation. They could still be allophones of some other phonemes (maybe  is the realization of  before ?), or a sequence of phonemes (maybe  is a coalescence of ?).
If this was true, the IPA chart for English would be missing  (since "hue" vs. "who" proves it's a phoneme!). --Ptcamn 04:35, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Same with  in "a nice cold shower" vs. "an ice cold shower".  As I write this, I just had the former. ;) --  Denelson83  04:49, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  The ʔ would only appear if you emphasize "ice", and there are more differences. Better ecxample is: "Some mice" or "Some ice", wich is practically the same unless you stress the difference with an unnatural break. Qvasi 10:49, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  What minimal pairs can do, and what they can't 

message: What about minimal phone pairs that are indistinguishable by the target language speakers. They prove that the phones in question are part of the repertoire of one and the same phoneme, right? Thus, it's a way of determining the phone repertoire of phonemes. Do you think it's worth including this more explicit wording about determining phoneme constituent phones, in the article?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.130.135.225 (talk) 00:01, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Minimal indistinguishables 

message: For example, English record (noun) and record (verb) (and similar pairs) appear superficially not to be minimal pairs for stress because they differ in vowel quality as well.
What of insight and incite. The vowels are pretty much the same, just the stress is different. 22:26, 31 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  stress minimal pairs 

message: Should some mention be made that since the existence of minimal pairs depends on vocabulary, there may happen not to be a minimal pair for a given pair of phone[me]s, and so its existence may be sufficient (barring any other caveats) but not necessary?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 163.1.19.175 (talk) 12:34, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sufficient not necessary? 

message: Is there any currently-used traditional pronunciation of Hebrew in which this occurs?  It seems quite unlikely to me, since glottal stops disappeared in this position historically rather early. AnonMoos (talk) 09:52, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: No, there isn't. I've just fixed it. 87.68.43.229 (talk) 10:40, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: /qaraʔ/

message: Just a question for information - if the Bibliography for an article gives the full title and other bibliographic information, isn't it sufficient for the References just to give author's name and the publication date? Someone has just added titles to all the References, which must have been quite a lot of work. RoachPeter (talk) 06:47, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  References 

message: The section Quantity has the sentence:
An example is the cŭ/cū minimal pair in the Italian dialect that is spoken near Palmi (Calabria, Italy) 
and the table heading:
Dialect spoken in Palmi
I have added the  template.
* Please replace "that is spoken near Palmi (Calabria, Italy)" and "Dialect spoken in Palmi" with the name of the dialect.
* It's fine to mention Palmi (Calabria, Italy), just don't stop with that.
* If feasible, Wikilink the dialect name in the sentence.
* If the wording is kept as is, is it "in" or "near" Palmi? Which is it?
As an accessibility note, people using screen readers will, depending on their settings, potentially hear table headings over and over as they read through a table. Very long table headings can get tedious, so just the dialect name is best.
Thisisnotatest (talk) 21:22, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dialect in or near Palmi