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

On Jul 22, 7:13 pm, Dominic Bojarski <dominicbojar...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Jul 22, 11:39 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jul 22, 1:48 pm, Dominic Bojarski <dominicbojar...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Where did you get the idea that there's a later portion of a sound
"that English speakers depend on for recognition"?
From listening to Poles and noticing that they clip particular sounds

very short to the point that I can't recognize it. Final m and n
become merged with the vowel to give a nasalized vowel, and final l is
hardly audible at all or is merged with the vowel to form a diphthong
followed by the slightest trace of an l.

What's that got to do with some illusory "final portion" of the
consonant not being articulated?

Ruud is given to flights of fancy, and most of his observation of
phonetics apparently comes from songs, from which you can tell little
about the duration of spoken segments.

Ruud has nothing to do with this.

You accepted his confirmation of your wacky theory of long consonants
with non-significant followed by significant portions.

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

I pronounce both with the accent on the first syllable. The problem is
not the stress.

In all contexts?? Then your command of English is, shall we say, not
mainstream.

Why you hate lower-class Englishmen.

Beg your pardon? Put the bottle down, Peter. I've said precious little
about Cockney in this thread at all, and nothing that could be
construed as hateful.

You have an irrational hatred for the [f v] substitution; you have
offered no explanation; I found a reasonable one.

Then why don't you teach your students to make the English sounds in
the first place, rather than telling them to make one inappropriate
substitution rather than another?

Because I'm not teaching them "in the first place". The students I
teach already have ingrained bad habits from previous teachers, Poles
themselves, who failed to correct the pronunciation, often because
they had pronunciation problems themselves. It takes a great deal of
time for Poles to learn how to pronounce [T D], and it's a lot easier
to do if they are starting with POLISH [t d] than with [f v].

Then you need to take the time and exert the effort.

You just said you grew up in a Polish-speaking community [in the US].
How did you manage to not learn the language as an infant?

You know precious little about language transmission in immigrant
communities.

The last immigrants came to my town in about 1920. After that point,
there was no influx of immigrants at all except an occasional priest.

Then it wasn't a "Polish-speaking community," was it. One of my best
friends in Chicago was the son of immigrants who never got more than a
few words of English. He spoke only Polish until he entered school
(at, I suppose, the age of 4 or 5) and interpreted for his parents
when necessary. (His English was perfect too, of course.) His father,
though, was able to ask me to be a pall-bearer at his funeral (AIDS
was different in those days -- he was not yet 30).

Few of the immigrants learned English beyond the basic conversational
level. My grandmother never learned English beyond the elementary
level even after seventy-five years of living in the States, in spite
of the fact that she lived with seven monolingual grandchildren. She
was quite satisfied with the level he reached. Many immigrants never
learned English at all beyond a few phrases that they could use in
fixed ...

read more »-

The sad story of grandchildren of immigrants is ubiquitous. My
father's parents died long before I was born (there's no indication
that he ever had a word of Ukrainian or Polish), and my mother's
parents were born in Brooklyn, so I never had a linguistic heritage to
be cut off from.

.