Re: OT: Phonetics (IPA)

Quoting Roger Mills <romilly@...>:

> Andreas Johansson wrote:>
> Nikhil Kinta wrote:
> > >
> > > But, if you consider the sounds that they produce, definitely, alveolars
> > > sound closer to retroflexes than dentals.
> > >
> > > The difference in opinion may be due to the fact that even if two
> languages
> > > have alveolar t and d, both language may pronounce it differently.
> >
> > My native language is Swedish.
> >
> > I'm no phonetician, and cannot say whether alveolars are acoustically
> closer
> > to retroflexes or dentals, but I am unable to consistently tell dentals
> and
> > alveolars (alveolars as heard in the varieties of English I've heard)
> apart,
> > whereas retroflexes sound quite different to me.
> >
> There is a very good reason for that.  Dentals and alveolars, usually (and I
> suspect by definition in IPA) are produced with a relatively wide area of
> the front of the tongue in contact with the teeth/alveolum.  (Technically,
> they are _laminar_.) The body of the tongue is relatively flat.
>
> In retroflexion, the tip of the tongue is curled back, so that only the tip,
> or at least a relatively smaller area than in a dental/alv. articulation,
> contacts the roof of the mouth anywhere from the alveolum to a bit further
> back (technically, _apical_) .  Curling/raising the tongue-tip produces a
> small hollow in the body of the tongue.  That changes the shape of the
> resonating chamber in the mouth, which changes the quality of the
> surrounding vowels (which would show up on a spectrogram).
Just what I wanted to hear!

I shall rest contented that the rest of were wrong! ;-)

                                                         Andreas