Re: Pronouncing Tokana (was RE: Importance of stress)

At 11:38 27/01/00 -0600, you wrote:
>
>I'm afraid I can't begin to decipher that.  "Tokana" is pronounced with
>stress on the penultimate syllable.  The /t/ and /k/ are both unaspirated,
>and thus often sound voiced to an English speaker's ear (e.g. my boyfriend
>imitates my pronunciation by calling it "Dogana").  As for the vowels,
>the /o/ is a short back rounded lax mid-vowel, similar to the "au" in
>"caught" (for those speakers who distinguish "caught" from "cot"), or
>else like the "o" in "sort".  The /a/ is as in "father".  There is
>no appreciable difference in length or quality between the stressed
>/a/ in the second syllable and the unstressed /a/ in the final syllable.
>
The strange thing for me is about this aspiration and the fact that
non-aspirated voiceless stops can sound like voiced to English speakers. As
a Frenchman trying to learn English, I nearly never heard a difference
between the 't' in 'top' and the 't' in 'stop', when spoken by a native
English speaker (sometimes I do, but I must be very careful when I listen
to the person - when I do that, generally I can't remember *what* the
person said, only *how* s/he said it :) - ). Confusing voiceless and voiced
stops seems also rather strange to me, as English has both. I can
understand that from a speaker of Mandarin, but not of English. Does that
really happen? I mean, when you hear a foreigner speaking English, do you
sometimes hear a voiced stop at the beginning of a word which was in fact
pronounced voiceless non-aspirated?

                                                        Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://rainbow.conlang.org