Minimal pair

Seen Phonologically form two words or phrases a minimal pair if they have the same number of sounds have different meaning and differ only in a tone or a phoneme. As further conditions for a minimal pair same word structure and membership of the words involved are determined to the same part of speech occasionally. Provided here is that all the considerations take place within a language or language family. Systematic creation of minimal pairs, one can determine the phonemes of a language. The set of all phonemes of a language are called phonemes of the language.

Phonological Analysis

If two sounds alone make the difference between two words, one can conclude that they belong to two different phonemes. So the words are different " beds " ( in careful pronunciation: [ bɛtən ] ) and " ask " ( [ bɪtən ] ) only in the volume of opposites ( = opposition) between [ ɛ ] and [ ɪ ]; they have the same number of sounds and a different meaning; also the further conditions: same part of speech, same word structure are met. This means that the German [ ɛ ] and [ ɪ ] belong to different phonemes.

To determine the phoneme inventory of a language, a second step is not necessary: you have to clarify what different sounds are not able to form a minimal pair. Thus, in German the so-called "I - sound" (phonetic: [ ç ]) and the " Ah - sound" ( [ χ ] ), which in the word pair " I " ( [ ɪç ] ) and " ah " ( [ aχ ] ) occur, do not form a minimal pair, because their occurrence depends on the previous vowel. Since both sounds are phonetically very similar (both are voiceless fricatives and differ only by the position of the hard ( [ ç ] ) or soft palate ( [ χ ] ), they are considered variants ( = allophones ) of the same phoneme.

Examples of minimal pairs

Examples from the German language:

  • Child and beef - / k / and / r /
  • Wall and wind - / a / and / i /
  • Wall and hand - / v / and / h /
  • Cars and gnaw - / v / and / n /
  • Haunt and spit - / u :/ and / u /, see vowel quantity
  • Construction and abdominal
  • Wrestle and bring

Examples of the English language:

  • Red and lot - / r / and / l /
  • Zeal and seal - / z / and / s /
  • Feet and seat - / f / and / s /
  • Meal and meat - / l / and / t /
  • Dime and time - / d / and / t /
  • Rhyme and time - / r / and / t /

Analogy in coding theory

In coding theory A correlation ( and generalization ) of the minimal pair approach under the concept of Hamming distance.

Voiceless palatal fricative
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