By now I expect that everybody else has given up on this thread. I shall stop too. I don't think I have anything fresh to add to what I have already said.
I don't think it was appropriate to not approve my first reply to this message though. If you want to not answer, fine, but censorship is childish. I assume it was indeed not approved on purpose, because I posted it about 30-36 hours ago, you were active plenty of time during that time and it still didn't appear. Thinking I wasn't going to suss it and re-post the message was kind of naive. I'm therefore going to bypass the necessity of you approving this post by altering the links, to make sure that this one will be visible.
To make them quickly go back to their original form, simply paste them in the Notepad, press Ctrl+H and in the "find what" field type "DOT", and in the one below type ".". Do the same with "SLASH" and "/", and there's your link, ready to be used.
Back on topic.
Most American English dialects are rhotic. As the /r/ is pronounced, 'fire' and 'fee' cannot be a minimal pair.
Most English English dialects are non-rhotic. The /r/ is not pronounced (except when followed by a vowel), but the sound following /f/ is a triphthong. Whether one considers a tripthong to be one or two syllables does not change the fact that triphthongs are not phonemes in British English, so 'fire' and 'fee' cannot be a minimal pair.
According to
your analysis. Apparently I was wrong too to say that they "are", they are according to
me and some phoneticians. It turns out that if you want them to be phonemes, they are. If not, they aren't. The rest of the post clarifies this statement.
Take a look at this: phonetic-blogDOTblogspotDOTcomSLASH2009SLASH12SLASHtriphthongs-anyoneDOThtml , particularly this quote:
John Wells quoting Peter Roach said:
To add to the difficulty, there is also the problem of whether a triphthong is felt to contain one or two syllables. Words such as ‘fire’ or ‘hour’ are probably felt by most English speakers (with BBC pronunciation) to consist of only one syllable, whereas ‘player’ /pleɪə/ or ‘slower’ /sləʊə/ are more likely to be heard as two syllables.
Feel and
hear as are pretty subjective.
In comments there's more interesing stuff, for example Peter Roach contradicting himself a bit:
Peter Roach said:
In talking of triphthongs, I make no claim that these have some special status as vocalic units in English phonology. I state quite clearly that they are sequences of certain diphthongs and a following schwa.
But there's also this site: wwwDOTphonDOTuclDOTacDOTukSLASHhomeSLASHwellsSLASHipa-english-uniDOThtm
John Wells said:
There are also the sequences to be heard in words such as fire, power, which some people analyse as triphthongs: they are represented by the diphthong symbols as in price, mouth plus schwa. Some authors recognize other similar sequences as well (player, slower...), but there really seems to be no need to list them separately.
That pretty much ends the discussion. Both of us were wrong and right at the same time.
I still prefer the analysis that consider them separate phonemes, but I won't insist anymore that this is the only correct analysis, and neither should you - because it is not true.