Re: CHAT: Phonemic status of English interdentals

Josh Brandt-Young sikyal:

> Peshik,
>
> I was thinking about our discussion some time ago of whether [T] and [D]
> should be considered separate phonemes in English, citing "minimal pairs"
> and whatnot, and decided to do a test on my (non-linguistically-savvy)
> girlfriend to see what I could see.
>
> I read the following text, changing all occurrences of [T] to [D]:
> (snip)
>
> I read it very quickly the first time, and as she noticed nothing
> remarkable, I read it again more slowly with fairly strong enunciation on
> the interdentals--still nothing. Even when I read the test words
> *individually* she had no idea what I was looking for.
>
> This seems to prove (at least in her dialect) that they're not separately
> phonemic--what do you think?
I think this mostly proves that hearers can restore incorrect phonetic
information very easily, given context, and do so unconsciously. It only
proves a mild point about /T/ and /D/. To prove what I'm saying, try
reading the passage substituting all instances of /k/ with /g/ (for
example). If you talk rapidly, chances are a hearer won't even notice. (I
tried it and it worked just this way.)

However, /D/ is a marginal phoneme in English, so I have somewhat free
variation in a lot of the words here. "Moth", for example, could be [mOT]
or [mOD] for me, without much difference. The distinction is only
completely salient in initial position--[DiNk] is completely unacceptable
as a pronunciation of "think", and there are some minimal pairs to be had:
"thigh" ~ "thy" is canonical.


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/

"What are you, a dentist? Or a hippie?
Or some kind of hippie dentist?"
--Strong Bad (of Homestar Runner)