Re: help! phonology...& addendum

> Date:         Tue, 24 Oct 2000 07:32:08 +0200
> From:         Irina Rempt <ira@...>
> They're in a class of their own; there are no dental stops in
> English, even if that's what they told us /t d/ were called. Why
> can't they teach the word "alveolar" to twelve-year-olds?
That would mean that the teacher would have to remember the word too.

> Dutch doesn't have /T D/, but it doesn't have the affricates /tS dZ/
> either, except in loan-words (or /S/ /Z/, for that matter, but those
> loan-words happen to be more frequent, mostly from French), so it's
> the same problem only with different orphans.
It seems that the auditory difference between dental, alveolar,
palatoalveolar, and retroflex fricatives is much greater than between
the corresponding stops.

So it's no wonder to me that many languages distinguish more of the
former than of the latter.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)