ArticlesA linguist friend explained to me today that two phonemes are considered not equivalent (in some sense) for a particular language if you can find a “minimum pair” – two words which are pronounced the same except for the two phonemes, which have different meanings.
The example he gave was the minimum pair of the “bit” and “pit” demonstrated that, in English, the “b” and “p” sounds are not equivalent.
He then gave an example of two phonemes in English, generally from the “th” spelling: /D/ (as in “this”) and /T/ (as in “thin).
His question was, in English, are the two different “th” phonemes equivalent?
That is: can you come up with two different words (spelling irrelevant but different meanings) which are pronounced exactly the same except that the “th” sound is voiced in one and not in the other?
Puzzle 1: Come up with an example, without using a computer. [The time to beat is about 30 minutes.]
Puzzle 2: Come up with all of the examples, with a computer. [The time to beat is about 40 minutes.]
Comment by Aristotle Pagaltzis on January 4, 2007
Is “thy†correct English these days? Probably not… which is a pity because that took me about 40 seconds. :P
Comment by Julian on January 4, 2007
It appeared in the (120,000 word) dictionary that I used, so I guess I have to allow it. Well done.
Then again, the dictionary offered some suspicious words that appeared in the result, like “Wetherby” (a town in West Yorkshire) versus “Weatherby” (a town in Missouri, population 123), so perhaps I shouldn’t use it as a judge.
Congratulations again on the fast time, which brings me neatly to the next puzzle…
Puzzle 3: What kind of freak manages to think of words like “thy” in the first 40 seconds?!?
Comment by Sarah McC on January 4, 2007
1)’sooth’ and ‘soothe’ (a few mins)
3)a verbivore
Comment by Julian on January 4, 2007
Weird: My dictionary doesn’t have “wether” in it, so my code didn’t offer wether/weather or wether/whether, but did offer Wetherby/Weatherby.
Comment by Aristotle Pagaltzis on January 4, 2007
It wasn’t actually very freaky. I noticed immediately that most short words starting with “th†seem to be of the /D/ variety (eg. this, that, these, their, though), so I was trying to come up with examples which start with /T/ immediately followed by a vowel. That brought me to “thigh†very quickly. I didn’t think of “thy†first. :-)
Comment by Sunny Kalsi on January 4, 2007
There’s a reason I would never be able to do this puzzle:
“thy”? but that would make the other word “thigh”… “thigh” is not a word!
Oh… a THIGH!
(makes more sense if you read that whole thing out loud, and pretend you don’t know how “thigh” is spelled).
Comment by Alan Green on January 9, 2007
I used the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. I got 41 pairs, but some of them are wrong – some of the different lines in the dictionary are for different pronounciations with the same meaning (eg UNTRUTHS has two pronounciations). However, my list includes “thy” and “thigh”, so it probably isn’t too far off 🙂
(22 minutes, but my python regex-fu stinks. I’m sure a Perler could do it in less than 5 minutes.)