tree, dream

>From: Muke Tever <mktvr@...>
>
>From: "Jake X" <alwaysawake247@...>
> > > On the word 'stoopit', I guess that's an American way of making
>'stupid'
> > > stupid, because they can't just do 'stoopid' because that's the normal
> > > pronunciation? The word seems to have essentially become 'stoopid'
> > > /stu;p@d/ here all the time, even though 'student' is still
>/stSu;d@nt/.
> > >
> > My dialect doesn't have /stSu:d@nt/ at all.  We say /stu;dent/, though
>in my
> > case I pronounce the /t/ with aspiration, not as sloppily as to have /t/
>-->
> > /tS/.  This is similar to the way my little brother, when he was
>learning to
> > write, misspelled "tree" as "chree": because of the combination of
>aspirated
> > t-initial and American semivocalic r, he percieved it with the wrong
> > phonemes.  Anyway....
>
>I wouldn't say it was with the wrong phonemes as that the spelling is
>outdated.
>It's certainly /tSri:/ here, with /S/ epenthetic[1].  And I wouldn't blame
>the
>aspiration either, because e.g., "dream" is /dZri:m/.  [At least in my
>lect.
>Yours will almost certainly differ, but presumably not your brother's.]
>
>     *Muke!
>--
>http://www.frath.net/
Wow this is true. I think I may have come across this before, but maybe not
this precise example. Certainly I say /'hIstS@ri/ or even /'hIstSj@ri/ for
"history", /'mIstS(j)@ri/ for "mystery", instead of the /'hIst@ri 'mIst@ri/
my mother tried to correct me with (or /'hIstri 'mIstri/, equally common).
What gets me is that that is before a vowel.

I have always thought of "tree" as /tr<o>i/ (<o> = voiceless diacritic in
ASCII-IPA). The standard British /r/ is supposedly an alveolar approximant,
but I have always found it to be a labiodental-palato-alveolar. Given the
palato-alveolar element I suppose it could glide from /t{pla}/ to /S/ to
/r{pla}{vls}/.

Similarly with "dream", it's definitely not just /drim/, sounds more like
/dZrim/. Again, the stop on the front is probably palato-alveolar in
anticipation of the /r/, and glides thru a fricative on the way.

And you can kind of see why - the stop has become assimilated to the place
of the approximant (if you agree with me that it's really palato-alveolar
not alveolar), and fricatives are a method physically in between stops and
approximants. So it's almost inevitable that eventually a fricative will be
put in there.

In a certain book a place is named "Jeamland" based on a child's
pronunciation of "Dreamland". That really is a childish (mis)pronunciation,
since it omits the labiodental aspect of /r/. But it replaces /r/ with...
/Z/, forming an affricate /dZ/.

Mat


_________________________________________________________________
Surf the Web without missing calls! Get MSN Broadband.
http://resourcecenter.msn.com/access/plans/freeactivation.asp

Reply