Talk:Minimal pair

Asian

Old talk
This article seems inconsistant about when to use [brackets] and when to use /slashes/. My psycholinguistics book says to use brackets for phones and and slashes for phonemes. Is there any reason not to follow this convention? --Ryguasu 22:09 Feb 28, 2003 (UTC)


 * English "let" + "lit" proves that phones /e/ and /i/ do in fact represent distinct phonemes [e] and [i].

I don't think these are the right symbols, at least if we're using IPA. The vowel in "let" should be /&epsilon;/, and that in "lit" should be /I/, no? Josh Cherry 00:55, 20 Oct 2003 (UTC)


 * That should be small capital I; otherwise you are correct. /e/ and /i/ distinguish "late" and "leet". -phma


 * Depends on what set of symbols you've chosen. Some sources for English choose "e", some choose "&#603;". Some choose "i" and "&#618;", some choose "i&#720;" and "i", some choose "i&#720;" and "&#618;". There's no universal agreement for how to use IPA for English. Hippietrail 07:13, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)


 * but Wikipedia articles should be consistent with the International Phonetic Alphabet for English article (though that should mention such disagreement). Joestynes 12:20, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

mûre sounds like it comes from Latin morus, morula "mulberry". The mulberry and the blackberry look similar, but are unrelated. The blackberry is an aggregate of drupelets in the rose family; the mulberry is a cluster of individual fruits in the mulberry family, which also includes the fig. The blackberry and raspberry are in the same genus. -phma

cire and wax is not a minimal pair. Someone made I joke, I guess. --129.11.157.69 13:24, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * I suspect you're meant to read it vertically, so that cire and sûre are minimal pairs. Could someone add the IPAs? (I don't read French.) Felix the Cassowary 08:40, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Sorry for the mess in history list (pressed some unknown buttton inadvertently). I have added the IPA transcriptions for the French examples. Since IPA is not a fixed pitch font, the layout became quite ugly. So I put the examples in tables instead. Could somebody convert the Hebrew examples to IPA? &minus;Woodstone 20:28, 2005 Jun 22 (UTC)

I used on purpose the colon ":" instead of the true IPA "" lengthening symbol because the latter ruins alignment and no confusion is possible. The box containing the symbol is both higher and wider than is normal for the font size, leading to ugly wide horizontal spacing and lifting the line slightly up. &minus;Woodstone 17:42, 2005 Jun 23 (UTC)


 * Woodstone, not everybody has an identical setup to yours in regards to fonts, OS, rendering system, and browser. We use the correct symbols here to help convince font makers etc of the need for them. In the meantime, the colon is the wrong symbol for people using cut & paste or search. Some solutions would be to fix the fonts used by the IPA template, or set a special font you know works for you for .IPA in your Monobook.css file or equivalent if you are using a different skin. &mdash; Hippietrail 05:50, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Tonal distinction
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)

IPA for all transcriptions
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)

Done for Thai and Dutch. Who can do Hebrew? &minus;Woodstone 13:20, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

Done. Aheppenh 19:05, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

Note on Spanish
The comment

In Spanish, [z] and [s] are both allophones of /s/ and [z] appears only before voiced consonants as in mismo /mizmo/.

is unclear for most Spanish speakers from Spain. Although [z] and [s] are allophones in Latin America and Andalucía, they are not in the rest of Spain.

Or am I getting it all wrong? Somebody please, an example in English of [z] and [s] if you think I am getting it wrong.

Nacho --Nachovaca 01:49, 17 August 2005 (UTC)


 * It's not saying that the sounds spelt z and s (and, for that matter, c before e/i) are the same sound: It's saying that Spanish doesn't distinguish between voiced and unvoiced alveolar fricatives, which are denoted in the IPA as [z] and [s]. A Spanish z (so I'm told) sounds like an English th, written in the IPA as [&theta;] (if s and z are distinguished). IPA [z] sounds like English S in advise or the Z in English size, zeal. IPA [s] sounds like English C in cell or the S in English size, seal. IPA [c] is a different sound again, but doesn't occur in English or to my knowledge Spanish. IPA sounds in square brackets basically always sound the same, no matter the language they're being used for (at least, they're meant to).


 * Is that clear? I can be bad at explaining things...


 * — Felix the Cassowary 04:46, 17 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Indeed z in most of Spain's spanish sounds like [&theta] but in Latin America and in Andalucia it is an allophone to s. IPA sound should do the trick. The point is the phrase in the beginning of this comment is imprecise.
 * Nachovaca 19:49, 26 September 2006 (UTC)nachovaca

Additions on limitations
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)

Limitations and flaws of the minimal pair concept and method
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. &minus;Woodstone 21:23, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

You are free to re-write it in encyclopedic style yourself Woodstone. Imagine your philosophy of knowledge: it's knowledge so long as it is written in some ill-defined 'encyclopedic style'. And arguments like this at wiki are like a cancer. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.213.110.232 (talk) 08:37, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Introduction
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)


 * 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)


 * Would you come to Talk:Montenegrin language and leave your comments, because there is dispute about that? Nikola 19:15, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Well, then consider the same question asking about [abc] vs [xbc]? Where a,b,c and x are phones used by native speakers. Why do we actually need meaningful utterances? If you insist on meaning i can easily come up with some neologisms to give them meaning. If a native can distinguish the two utterances (no matter the meaning) we have a valid minimal pair, don't we? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.130.135.225 (talk) 23:38, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Russian language
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)

Hebrew language
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).

What minimal pairs can do, and what they can't

 * 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)
 * 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)
 * 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)

I agree completely that lit vs. let does not prove there is a vowel-based phoneme difference. There is proof that the two words contrast, but the location of that contrast in the words is not proved, but is an analytical construct, and what phonologists and phoneticians do is argue about the systm. In this case, they agree on the vowel distinction because it makes for a nice system. "minimal" is the big, big problem in the concept of minimal pair - it is impossible to provide a first minimal pair for an unanalysed language. The issue of "hue" vs. "who" is a case in point. The former word could either starts /hj/ or // - both of which are minimally different from "who" - but in the case of /hj/, where the use of the consonant symbol /j/ implies that the minimality is between /h/ in "who" and /hj/ in "hue", I could analyse the word as containing the diphthong /iu/, in which case the minimal difference is between the vowel /u/ and the vowel /iu/. In addition, some differences are only ever apparently minimal because of the abstract segmental transcription which is used, which hides the many phonetic differences between two words in favour of a single differnece. "Minimal" pair means a single difference in a an analytic description language, not a single difference in sound or articulation, so it must be made quite clear that this is an abstract, theory-led, phonological concept.

Minimal indistinguishables
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)

stress minimal pairs
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) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.77.186.41 (talk)

Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and Italian have many minimal pairs differing only in stress.

I disagree with Romanian having many of those. It certainly has some (the most commonly quoted is included in this article), but they're not very common. Stress isn't even marked when writing Romanian. Greek would be a much better example with many stress minimal pairs. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.177.44.101 (talk) 23:34, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Sufficient not necessary?
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)

/qaraʔ/
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)
 * No, there isn't. I've just fixed it. 87.68.43.229 (talk) 10:40, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Minimal Pair
I'm sorry to say that this article contains a lot of misunderstandings and confusions. The most important point is that if 'Minimal Pair' refers to anything at all, it is to a pair of words that differ in just one phonological item. In this article, we get a section called "Differentiations in English" that neatly sets out in a table some English minimal pairs with the two words set side by side. It seems to me that this table says all that needs to be said for English (though I would take issue with the discussion of the phonetic characteristics of /p/ and /b/, which I think are irrelevant here). However, lower down we get "Differentiating Vowels" and "Differentiating Consonants" with French examples. Here we no longer get minimal pairs, but sets of phonemic contrasts, including the opposition of the presence vs. absence of a consonant. There is in the phonological literature plenty of discussion of multiple oppositions and of oppositions with zero (this is mainly found in works of the Prague School and their later followers), but the examples given here, though interesting, do not show minimal pairs and should not be here. In the discussion of vowels we are told that the French front rounded vowels may sound alike to Anglophones - this is a non sequitur and should be removed. The fact that a language doesn't have this or that phonemic opposition doesn't mean that its speakers can't hear a difference between the members of that opposition when heard in another language. Almost all the rest of the article is about phonological oppositions and not about minimal pairs. I suggest the article on Minimal Pairs should be much shorter (but perhaps contain some historical material about why it was such an important concept in the early days of phoneme theory and in the development of discovery procedures, and why it is seen as much less important today), while the useful but irrelevant stuff should be moved out to other articles on phonology. I'll leave everything as it is while waiting to see if anyone disagrees. RoachPeter (talk) 16:47, 31 December 2012 (UTC)


 * I do not so strongly object to sets of oppositions being included in this article on minimal pairs, because they are a natural logical extension of the idea of minimal pairs. When one merges multiple minimal pairs, one gets a set of oppositions. It should, of course, be clarified that these sets are not minimal pairs: a pair is by definition a set of two members. That the article doesn't explain that is, I agree, a problem.


 * But I do not strongly object to the sets of oppositions being moved to a different article — if, at least, there is an article to move them to. I do not think there is one at the moment. At least, I can't think of a commonly used term whose article would likely be able to include sets of oppositions. Unless there is such an article or someone starts one, we may as well keep them here, since they're very nice and worth keeping somewhere.


 * I suppose we could move them to their respective language's phonology articles, but I don't think that would be appropriate, since they are better suited to illustrating techniques used in phonology than demonstrating the phonology of a particular language.


 * I am not particularly interested in making the changes to this article that I have suggested, but if you do not want to, then I suppose I should maybe do them, since it was me that suggested them. But tell me what you think of my comments first. — Eru·tuon 21:21, 31 December 2012 (UTC)


 * The technical linguistic term is probably "distinctive opposition" or "distinctive contrast", but I'm not too sure that it's suitable for a separate article. AnonMoos (talk) 00:18, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I've been looking again at the Minimal Pair article, and though I really don't want to be negative about it, I do have the following main worries: (1) most of the article isn't about minimal pairs, (2) apart from some useful examples of phonemic contrast, it really adds practically nothing in terms of theory that isn't already in the articles on (a) Phoneme and (b) Phonology, (3) there is no citation of published work at all in the article and (4) there are some errors of fact and theory throughout the article. Concerning (1), I think that if the article was called something like "Phonemic Contrasts", or "Phonological Oppositions", the title would more accurately reflect the contents. As far as (2) is concerned, it seems to me that the article stops being about minimal pairs at the start of 'Differentiating consonants with same location and manner of articulation' and becomes a general exposition of phonemic contrasts. I would cut the article short at this point if it were up to me, but I don't want to go deleting big chunks of someone else's work. Regarding (3), there is plenty of literature on minimal pairs, particularly from pioneering articles and books of the mid-20th century, but the groundwork of this topic is already covered in other articles. On (4), here are some of the things I would like to raise:
 * in the opening paragraph, 'phone' is classed as a phonological element, whereas I thought the point of a phone was that is was not a phonological element.
 * in the next paragraph there is discussion of what (phonetically) distinguishes English /p/ from /b/. There is a lot of published discussion of the suggested distinction between /p/ and /b/ on the basis of 'fortis' and 'lenis' articulation. Duration of the plosive would be a pretty shaky basis for distinguishing the two phonemes, given the many contextual effects. It's not necessary to go into phonetic detail here, anyway.
 * In the table with the green blobs (Differentiating consonants with same location and manner of articulation), there is no explanation of why differently-sized blobs are used in the English example. In the third category (French and Portuguese) it is claimed that "In Romance languages and other European languages only phones (and phonemes) [p] and [b] occur". If this means that only English, of all European languages, has an aspirated allophone of [p], I find the claim difficult to believe.
 * In "Differentiating vowels", I have already pointed out that is not necessarily the case that if a speaker of one language hears sounds which contrast in another language but not in her own, she will be unable to hear the difference. In the table of this section, the examples 'sieur' and 'sueur' are not examples of vowel contrasts, but show a contrast between two prevocalic approximants.
 * In "Differentiating consonants", an example is given of a supposed minimal contrast of a "present" consonant with an "absent" one (i.e. a contrast between a consonant and zero). You can make an argument for this being a minimal pair, but it's a very special case and needs a thoughtful introduction.


 * If any senior WP editor with expertise in this area reads this, I think it would be very helpful if they could suggest a way out of the problem. One criterion I often use in judging a WP article is asking myself what one of my students would have made of the article if they had been asked to produce a paper on the subject. I can't imagine getting a very good essay on Minimal Pairs from a student who had studied this article, though they would certainly have learned some useful facts about phonemic contrasts. 90.28.71.149 (talk) 20:47, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Sorry, my signature to the above didn't get attached. RoachPeter (talk) 21:01, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

I'm responding to the Request for Comment. I agree that after the first list of minimal pairs in English the article just gets confusing. I suppose it is useful to show that the concept of minimal pair applies to all languages, not just English. Only a few examples would be necessary to show that, and they should be genuine pairs. Two syllables that differ only by tone in Mandarin might be appropriate. Itsmejudith (talk) 23:52, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the response. I have now rewritten the article quite extensively and put in citations where needed. It's in my sandbox, and I would be pleased if you could give it a quick look over. I'll leave it there for a few days, then if I don't hear any objection I'll put it in place of the present article. RoachPeter (talk) 16:21, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Dialect in or near Palmi
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 clarify 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)