Re: OT: Phonetics (IPA)

"Mark J. Reed" wrote:
> For a better example without the spurious differences, remove the "it" -
> just contrast "catch" with "catsh"  (as in the stereotypical drunk
> person's/Sean Connery's pronunciation of "cats").
Interesting.  I just noticed that in my speech, /S/ as an independent
phoneme is not exactly the same as the second element in the phoneme
/tS/.  /S/ is produced slightly further back than /tS/, which is
produced at the same POA as /t/.

> It is certainly true that most English speakers consider /tS/ and
> /dZ/ to be individual sounds, while at the same time recognizing that
> the sound of the letter "x" is just /ks/ (sometimes voiced as [gz]).
> But I think it's still an open question whether the distinction
> is really phonemic.
But, if it's not, than you'd have to specify that the clusters /tS/ and
/dZ/ can occur syllable-initially while no other stop-fricative cluster
can.  Also, that /tS/ and /dZ/ can occur syllable-finally while for /p/
/b/ /k/ and /g/, only /s/ and /z/ can follow them in the same syllable.

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