Talk:Contrastive distribution
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minimal pairs are not sufficient for phonemicity
[edit ]The article currently claims that minimal pairs are alone a sufficient condition for establishing phonemes. This is a common white lie told to people starting out in phonology, but it is not true, it is merely strong evidence for it being so. There are plenty of cases where minimal pairs exist without it establishing phonemicity (think retroflexes in Norwegian, we have katt [kɑt:] – cat and kart [kɑʈ:] – map. Despite the minimal pair (for reasons I won't go into), most phonologists do not consider retroflexes to be phonemic in Norwegian, but rather as underlying clusters such as /rt/.)
Upon rereading the given source, I see that it does not even claim that minimal pairs are sufficient for phonemicity, merely that they "play an important role in figuring out the distribution of phones in a language and how they may be grouped into the same or different phonemes". I have therefore adjusted the article accordingly - in line with the given source. Megaman en m (talk) 18:18, 24 May 2024 (UTC) [reply ]