Re: OT: Phonetics (IPA)

On Sun, 2003-07-13 at 00:36, Stone Gordonssen wrote:
> >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.
>
> Whereas for me, a native speaker of southern USA English, alveolar and
> dental /t/ and /d/ sound distinctively different, but alveolar and
> retreoflecive ones are diffulcult to differentiate.
Yeah, I have to agree with you, though as a speaker of Victorian
Australian English. A dental stop has a sort of th-ness to it, whereas
the first time I heard Swedish and could compare it to how it was spelt,
I thought they'd dropped some Rs.

--
Tristan.

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