Minimal Pair List Consonants /d/ versus /ʒ/, 9 pairs
The spelling of /d/ is <d> or <dd>. The /ʒ/ sound is spelled <ge> or <zu>.
The contrast is between a stop and a fricative, both voiced and fairly close in the mouth. It might be a slight problem for speakers of languages which do not have the /ʒ/ sound, such as German and Arabic.
The consonant /d/ can occur in any position in the syllable, but /ʒ/ only occurs finally or intervocalically, other than in foreign names or loan words such as
gendarme
. /ʒ/ is in any case a very rare phoneme, found in only 334 words in the source dictionary.
The figure for the mean density of this contrast is 0.1%. The set makes 7 semantic contrasts, a loading of 77%.
adder azure
adders azures
bayed beige
brewed Bruges
brood Bruges
cedar seizure
cedars seizures
rood rouge
rude rouge
.
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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.
