Re: OT: Phonetics (IPA)

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