Re: What's the different between /tS/ as one phoneme and as two?

From: Derek Rogers (derek_at_derek.co.uk)
Date: 08/01/04 

Date: Sun, 01 Aug 2004 20:27:02 +0100

On Sat, 31 Jul 2004 13:09:52 -0000, "Douglas G. Kilday"
<fufluns@chorus.net> wrote:

>> > A native French-speaker does
>> > not consider liquid codas to constitute syllables, and to him it is
>> > "obvious" that a word like <quatre> has one syllable. To a native
>> > English-speaker it is equally "obvious" that words of this phonetic
>shape
>> > have two syllables.
>>
>> The main reason for this is that French has a maintenance of
>> articulatory tension during an utterance that is often audibly released
>> at the end of that utterance, whereas in English this tension is not
>> continuously maintained. English speakers thus tend to hear the release
>> as a syllable, whereas French speakers do not. Whether it actually
>> contains two syllables or not is open to debate....

That explains why my brother-in-law can't pronounce the name of the
university where he got his Ph. D. - he calls it Grenobbler. But this
still doesn't tell us whether his difficulty is perceptual or
articulatory.

Derek Rogers

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