Minimal Pair List Consonants /ʒ/ versus /j/, 0 pairs
The dictionary search failed to find any words with this pairing. /ʒ/ is in any case very rare and does not occur in syllable initial position except in a few French loan words such as
gendarme
, while /j/ is restricted to syllable-initial occurrence. There is no reason why there should not be a pairing with a loan word, such as
gigue
versus
*yeag
(if there was such a word) but none have surfaced.
.
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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.
