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Re: retroflex consonants

From:Joe <joe@...>
Date:Tuesday, January 28, 2003, 21:20
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?

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Josh Brandt-Young <vionau@...>