Re: retroflex consonants

On Tuesday 28 January 2003 9:06 pm, Josh Brandt-Young wrote:
> 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]?

I thought |sz| and |z.| were both postalveolar ([S] and [Z]).  Am I insane?

Reply