Minimal pair

From Citizendium
Revision as of 10:37, 22 April 2008 by imported>Ro Thorpe (made into lists - put on pron later perhaps)
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This article is a stub and thus not approved.
 Main Article
 Discussion
Related Articles  [?]
Bibliography  [?]
External Links  [?]
Citable Version  [?]
 
https://en.citizendium.org/wiki/index.php?title=Minimal_pair&printable=yes
This editable Main Article is under development and subject to a disclaimer.

In linguistics, two words differing by only one unit of sound, or phoneme, are called a minimal pair. Minimal pairs are widely used in language teaching. Typical examples are:

  • 'cat' and 'mat'
  • 'fish' and 'wish'
  • 'abortion' and 'apportion'

Spelling can disguise the fact of a minimal pair; some examples of this are:

  • 'bane' and 'boon'
  • 'league' and 'leak'
  • 'do' and 'two'
  • 'Evans' and 'heavens'
Retrieved from "https://citizendium.org/wiki/index.php?title=Minimal_pair&oldid=395655"