Re: CHAT: Phonemic status of English interdentals

In a message dated 10/9/02 8:05:15 AM, morg0072@FLINDERS.EDU.AU writes:

>Josh Roth wrote, quoting Tristan:
>
>> > unless you analyse [&l] as /el/, which doesn't explain why 'shall'
>> > and 'shell' are homophones. Not that I know a lot about phonemes...
>>
>> Well I'm not too familiar with your speech variety at all (I've only
>> heard Australian speech in some beer commercials I think!). Those two
>> words are not homophones for me though, the first is /S&l/ and the
>> second /SEl/.
>
>Most Australians will agree with you. However, Tristan comes from
>Victoria where people often have a noticeably lower /E/ in certain
>positions, e.g. before /l/. For some Victorian speakers this /E/ can
>be as low as /&/, or so close that I can't tell the difference. One
>of my non-current lecturers is an example.
Thank you for explaining that.

>Note: I'll happily use either /E/ or /e/ to denote the same phoneme.
You have no distinction between the two then? Very interesting....

>> > Much more likely to merge into /f/ and /v/. Over on this side of
>> > Melbourne, you hear people talking of veir maffs... I guess these
>> > people are aware of the difference...
>>
>> You may certainly be right. I however, never hear /f/ and /v/ for /T/
>and
>> /D/, except in references to the speech of some Black people or
>
>I'm currently in an email discussion with a person from Israel, and we
>have been discussing phonetics among many other topics. He mentioned
>his inability to master the English "th". I mentioned the mantra that
>I was taught as a young child: "Put your tongue between your teeth and
>say /thhh/". His response was, "Put your tongue between your teeth and
>say ouch is how I would put it". :-)
>
>Adrian.
Hmmm ... yes it could be dangerous if you're not used to it, I suppose. I
once met in Israel a Hungarian who spoke English pretty well but always
replaced /T/ and /D/ with /s/ and /z/ (I thought for the longest time he was
very interested in Seattle, and kind of nodded along, but finally one day it
dawned on me that he meant "theater"). I thought I'd be nice and help him one
day to pronounce the interdentals, and was surprised to learn that he had no
trouble saying them. He just prefered not to use them cause he didn't like
the sounds. I was quite amused.


Josh Roth
http://members.aol.com/fuscian/home.html

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