Minimal Pair List Consonant /ʒ/ versus null, 25 pairs

The /ʒ/ sound is spelled with <ge>, <su>, <si> in suasion , <zu> in seizure or <j> in jabot .

The /ʒ/ sound is one of the rarest RP consonant phonemes, only occurring in 334 words in this dictionary, of which many are fairly recent loan words from French. In several cases deleting /ʒ/ when it followed /e/ and preceded a schwa left behind a word containing the /eə/ diphthong, such as measure/mare . It is disputable if these pairs are minimal, or whether deleting /eə/ before syllabic -n as in lesion/lean yields a true minimal pair since two syllables are then reduced to one. The contrast is not a problem.

The density value is 2.9%. The list makes 8 semantic distinctions, a loading of 80%.

 	
beige bay  
beige bey
Bruges brew
jabot Abo
  jabots Abos
leisure lair
leisured laird
lesion lean
  lesions leans
Limoges limo
luge lieu
luge loo
measure mare
  measures mares
measure mayor
  measures mayors
rouge roo
rouge rue
  rouged rued
  rouging ruing
rouged rood
rouged rude  
seizure seer
  seizures seers   
suasion swain

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John Higgins

John Higgins retired in 2000, having spent the bulk of his career as a British Council English Language Officer working in Thailand, Turkey, Egypt and Yugoslavia and the last fifteen years in lectureships at Bristol University and then running an M.Sc. programme at Stirling University. His main field was EFL, with a special interest in CALL (computer-assisted language learning) in which, together with Tim Johns of Birmingham, he was responsible for important developments in methods and materials. His publications include A Guide to Language Laboratory Material Writing, Universitetesforlaget, 1969, Computers and Language Learning, Collins, 1984, Language Learners and Computers, Longman, 1988, and Computers in English Language Learning, Intellect Press, 1992, together with numerous papers, reviews and pieces of software. He maintains a web page on minimal pairs and homographs for teachers of English pronunciation skills.