Re: Chinese Dialect Question

On 3 Oct 2003 at 12:18, Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 04:37:14PM +0100, Joe wrote:
> > Well, in a lot of S. English dialects, /T/ and /f/ have merged into [f].
>
> Really?  So "path" is [paf] in adult speech?   That sounds so much like
> a child's error to me that I have trouble imagining it as a dialectical
> variant.
I can support this, and also that [D] has merged with [v].

Given the local vowel distribution, it's more likely to be [pAf] and [pAvz] than [paf]
and [pavz].

It's part of my lowest-register idiolect, and likewise for most of my cohorts aged from
childhood up to full adulthood, in moderately urban areas around the immediate
north-west of London.

However, word-initially, [T] and [D] seem to retain their values in all my idiolects.
Pronouncing "think" as [fInk] has the hallmark of a typically London-and-parts-
eastwards accent than it does of the accents I grew up with.

> But I don't know that you can claim  [T] is particularly difficult, since
> many children say [T] when trying to say [s].  It just depends on the
> child.
I can't see why [T] is so difficult. You gently bite the tip of your tongue and breathe
out. What's hard about that? For a linguist, [D] is the same thing voiced, although I
can see it being harder to describe to a non-linguist.



Paul

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