Re: Subtitutes for English /T/ and /D/

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 14:39:44 -0700: "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:

Read it again. "Polish pronunciation stops far short of the portion of
the sound that English speakers depend on for recognition. We just
hear "something" that we cannot interpret." Another poster on this
thread commented that for him, the English "n" seems to last FOUR
TIMES as long as the "n" in his language, which I believe was Dutch.
The same thing with Polish. Polish speakers break off the sound before
they get to the part that we English speakers need in order to
recognize it.

If you're unable to discuss language and linguistic phenomena using
the terminology that phoneticians and linguists have developed over
the past two centuries, maybe you should go learn the terminology
before you try to express yourself. The above paragraph _still_ is
uninterpretable.

It strikes me as crystal clear. Perhaps you are so struck in
lingtistic terminology and dogmas that you don't recognize simple
down-to-earth wording anymore?

Where did you get the idea that there's a later portion of a sound
"that English speakers depend on for recognition"?

Ruud is given to flights of fancy, and most of his observation of
phonetics apparently comes from songs, /

But not thisss onnnnne. English I have heard spokenn maw thannnn
sungngngng.

from which you can tell little about the duration of spoken segments.

You cann.

And it is one of the first things they learn. Without any difficulty,
actually. Learning to pronounce differences in vowel duration is a
different matter, though, and most Poles have a great deal of trouble
learning that. My boyfriend has been living with me for three years
and now speaks intimidatingly good English, except for the fact that
he just can't pick up the rhythm of the language, in spite of all the
time we have spent working on it.

Are you saying he can't pronounce the difference between THIRty and
thirTEEN?

I often find the difference hard to hear when the numbers are said by
native speakers too, despite of having a native language that also has
/I/ and /i/ and phonemic stress: Dutch.

As for Cockney, I doubt that many Americans are aware that the [f v]
substitution is a feature of that dialect. The first time I heard it,
I considered it to be a speech defect particular to that speaker.

The very fact that you noticed it marks you as unusual.

Even if the spectograms of isolated [f] and [T] are almost identical,
the influence they have on adjacent sounds, especially vowels, may me
very different, due to lip movement vs. tongue movement. It is that
influence that recognition almost solely relies on. It's not for
nothing that early attempts at speech synthesis, based on single
phonemes, failed miserably, until they found out that the basis should
be _combinations_ of two or three phonemes. Current systems sound
almost natural, and are very easy to understand. In NL, you can now
send an SMS (text message) to a landline phone that isn't equipped for
it, and the message is read aloud by a computer, very realistically
and understandably.

--
Ruud Harmsen
http://rudhar.com

.