Re: help! phonology...& addendum

> > I've heard this rule, too, but I just thought of an obvious
> > exception in
> > English.  English has six dental/alveolar fricatives /T D s z S Z/
> > but
> > only four sounds that could reasonably be called stops /t d tZ dZ/.
> > No
> > matter how you slice it *some* set of fricative is gonna be
> > orphaned,
> > unless you make the silly assertion that /T D/ are the "same class"
> > as /s
> > z/.
>
> What I am about to say may raise some controversy (which I love to do ;)
> -- I do believe that English has alveolar sibilant affricates but doesn't
> want to admit it:
>
> /adz/ "adze"
> /ad/ "add"
> /az/ "as"
>
> /sits/ "sits"
> /sit/ "sit"
> /sis/ "sis" (< "sister")
>
> Which results in six fricatives for six stops/affricates. But there still
> could be exceptions to what is obviously a "universal"; can't think of
> any right now but always leave room for an exception...
Of course English has the sequences [dz] and [ts], but I seriously doubt
that they are phonemic.  They are only common in word-final situations,
and except for a few oddities like "adze" all of the [dz] combinations I
can think of are morphologically marked forms like [l&dz] "lads", which is
a plural.

Most damnably, [dz ts] cannot occur initially at all, while all of the
other fricatives or affricates can.  An untrained English speaker cannot
pronounce initial [ts] when prompted, and tends to hear initial [ts] as
[s] when pronounced by a foreigner.  So I don't think so.

>
> DaW.
>
Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
"It is of the new things that men tire--of fashions and proposals and
improvements and change.  It is the old things that startle and
intoxicate.  It is the old things that are young."
-G.K. Chesterton _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_