One of the few examples is thigh vs. thy although the two can be distinguished from context alone. Similar is the difference of (written ⟨j⟩, ⟨ge⟩, etc.) versus (resulting from , or the ⟨j⟩, ⟨ge⟩, etc. in some recent French loanwords), as in virgin vs. version. The difference between the two ⟨ng⟩ sounds, , found in singer and finger, is so unimportant that it makes no practical difference if one confuses them, and some dialects pronounce the sounds the same in both words. The functional load is nearly zero, which is unsurprising since the phoneme originated as a coalescence of when it was word-final. An ongoing example would be the merger of the AIR and EAR vowels in New Zealand English. The phonetic similarity between words like here and hare does not seem to hamper oral communication greatly if context is provided. Therefore, those vowels have low functional load in New Zealand English despite their high frequency of occurrences in that dialect. The distinction is fully maintained in nearby Australian English, where many find comedy and confusion in mergers such as sheep-sharing vs. sheep-shearing. Mandarin The functional load of tone in Mandarin Chinese is approximately equal to the functional load of vowels. The loss of information when all tones sound alike in Mandarin is approximately equal to that when all vowels sound alike. By contrast, in many Bantu languages, the tones have a low functional load, and in Swahili, tones have disappeared altogether. References Phonology