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Re: OT: Phonetics (IPA)

From:Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Date:Sunday, July 13, 2003, 9:53
Quoting Tristan <kesuari@...>:

> On Sat, 2003-07-12 at 18:56, Andreas Johansson wrote: > > Quoting Joe <joe@...>: > > > > > AFAIK, this is a pretty common confusion in languages with retroflexes. > > > However, I, as a native English speaker, would place dentals and > alveolars > > > together, and retroflexes seperately, whereas evidently you would place > > > retroflexes and alveolars together, and dentals seperately. > > > > I might point out that for me, whose native language distinguishes dentals > and > > retroflexes (regardless of whether we phonemize [t`] as /rt/ - it still > > contrasts with [t_d] /t/), alveolars sounds like dentals, not retroflexes. > > Is that influenced by the way it's written though? I know it shouldn't > be, but a number of the more blatant differences between American and > Australian English (rhoticness, for example) are harder to hear than the > subtle ones for me (when not listening for them) and make it harder to > recognise an <r> as worth paying attention to before a consonant if I'm > just randomly listening, no matter the value of said <r> (i.e. [r], > [r\], [r\`], [4], [R\], [R]...). Stupid brain interfering again...
I can't rule out such influence. Not technically evidence, but the IPA provides different signs for [t] and [t`], but you have to use a diacritic to indicate [t_d]. This rather suggests that its devicers concidered dentals closer to alveolars than are retroflexes, does it not? Again, does anyone know which is the more similar pair acoustically? Andreas