Minimal Pair List Consonant /ʒ/ versus vowels, 5 pairs
The /ʒ/ sound occurs initially in a handful of loan words from French such as
gendarme
, medially in derivatives such as
collision
, in a few words ending in -ure such as
leisure
and
treasure
, and finally in a few words of French origin such as
luge
and
rouge
. It is the rarest of RP phonemes, occurring in only 334 words in the Mitton dictionary.
Since it does not enter any consonant clusters, there are hardly any instances of its making a minimal pair with a vowel. However there is one case of /ʒ/ versus /ɪ/
luge Louis
and one of /ʒ/ versus /eɪ/
rouge roué
There are also several cases where changing /ʒ/ to /ɪ/ yields a new word with /eɪ/. Whether these could be called minimal pairs is doubtful.
leisure layer
leisured layered
pleasure player
.
Ready to improve your english accent?
Get a FREE, actionable assessment of your english accent. Start improving your clarity when speaking
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.
