{"id":335,"date":"2007-01-04T01:09:12","date_gmt":"2007-01-03T14:09:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2007\/01\/04\/d-versus-t-a-linguistic-puzzle\/"},"modified":"2007-10-07T20:10:08","modified_gmt":"2007-10-07T10:10:08","slug":"d-versus-t-a-linguistic-puzzle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2007\/01\/04\/d-versus-t-a-linguistic-puzzle\/","title":{"rendered":"\/D\/ versus \/T\/: A Linguistic Puzzle"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"aside\">I may misuse the linguistics terms here; please forgive me.<\/div>\n<p>A 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 &#8220;minimum pair&#8221; &#8211; two words which are pronounced the same except for the two phonemes, which have different meanings.<\/p>\n<p>The example he gave was the minimum pair of the &#8220;bit&#8221; and &#8220;pit&#8221; demonstrated that, in English, the &#8220;b&#8221; and &#8220;p&#8221; sounds are not equivalent.<\/p>\n<p>He then gave an example of two phonemes in English, generally from the &#8220;th&#8221; spelling: \/D\/ (as in &#8220;<strong>th<\/strong>is&#8221;) and \/T\/ (as in &#8220;<strong>th<\/strong>in).<\/p>\n<p>His question was, in English, are the two different &#8220;th&#8221; phonemes equivalent?<\/p>\n<p>That is: can you come up with two different words (spelling irrelevant but different meanings) which are pronounced exactly the same except that the &#8220;th&#8221; sound is voiced in one and not in the other?<\/p>\n<p>Puzzle 1: Come up with an example, without using a computer. [The time to beat is about 30 minutes.]<\/p>\n<p>Puzzle 2: Come up with all of the examples, with a computer. [The time to beat is about 40 minutes.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Can you come up with two different words (spelling irrelevant but different meanings) which are pronounced exactly the same except that the &#8220;th&#8221; sound is voiced in one and not in the other?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[105,55,69],"class_list":["post-335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-puzzle-solving","tag-linguistics","tag-puzzle","tag-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}