[Avery Andrews 931017.1618]
(Hank Folson (931016))
> I see
>Bill Power's dormitive effect here: words that sound the same have no
>phonemic contrast (sound the same), those that don't sound the same, have
>phonemic contrast (don't sound the same). What do traditional linguistics
>gain from this sort of exercise? What does the linguist know after the
>experiment that he didn't know before? Or, to put it another way, what is
>he controlling for?
Words that sound different to speakers of one language often sound the
same to speakers of another, because different features of sound are
contrastive in different languages. Furthermore, speakers will
sometimes say that words that mean different things sound different,
even when there is actually no significant difference between them.
The pair test helps establish which differences of sound are actually
significant in a language, and what just permissable variation.
Especially, if speaker A can't tell which of two meanings speaker B
is trying to convey, the forms don't contrast. This is often extremely
difficult to be sure about on the basis of casual observation.
>Does traditional linguistics have any explanatory capacity to explain why
>putting an s in front of pin-bin results in losing the difference? Does it
>explain why other consonants don't have the same effect? Why has the
At a deep level, there is no explanation - it's just something that
happens in English (but not all dialects -- as you will hear if you
listen to David Attenborough say `sperm'). The phenomenon seems to
be connected to syllable structure: syllable-initial voiceless stops
get the `aspirition' (pause between consonant release and start of
voicing in `pin', and `s' (and `sh', if you have Yiddish-derived words
like `shtick' in your vocabulary) is the only consonant that can appear before
a voiceless stop at the beginning of a word, which is the easiest
position to investigate this sort of thing.