Re: mutation and rinya

On Mon, 9 Aug 1999, John Cowan wrote:

> dirk elzinga wrote:
>
> > American English flapping is an
> > example of this; /t/ and /d/, when following a stressed vowel and
> > preceding a stressless vowel are pronounced as flaps.
>
> This is overly restrictive, at least for me:  I pronounce
> "What are they?" as [w@*'ARDej], where * = flap, R =
> bunched approximant.
Yeah, you're right. There is still some discussion on the precise
statement of the American English flapping rule. The description I gave
above wasn't intended to be definitive, but only to give an example of a
lenition process which would be familiar to many on the list. Still, I
didn't expect to find an instance of flapping which was so obviously
missed by that description!

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu                   "All grammars leak."
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~elzinga/                 -Edward Sapir