Re: OT: Phonetics (IPA)

Quoting Tristan <kesuari@...>:

> 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.
They might've - there's plenty of varieties that switched the retroflexes to
dentals, or perhaps simply dropped the r's directly.

But aside from that, I'm again being astounded by what little relationship
there seem to be between what people hear and the actual physical characterica
of speech sounds.

                                                    Andreas