Re: retroflex consonants

Quoth Jan van Steenbergen:

> I have been under that assumption too, but then I was told by a native speaker
> that Polish _sz_ and _z._ are alveolars and not retroflexes.
> Czech, OTOH, is supposed to have retroflexes, I think.
I think it may be likely that the native speaker with whom you spoke wasn't
looking at things from an objective point of view (in much the same way that
a native English speaker, though clearly no one with linguistic training,
might swear that "th" constitutes two sounds). There's a Pole in the
Linguistics department here at Berkeley who has done all the analysis with
spectrograms and whatnot, and confirms that they are *quite* retroflexed.

But then, if they were alveolar, what would differentiate them from [s] and
[z]?


Czesc,
    Josh

----------
Josh Brandt-Young <vionau@...>
"After the tempest I behold, once more, the weasel."
(Mispronunciation of Ancient Greek)

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