Re: YAEPT: track

Yahya, you seem to be setting the "reply-to" header. Could you perhaps
disable it?

On 13/06/06, Yahya Abdal-Aziz <yahya@...> wrote:
...
> > > On 6/12/06, caeruleancentaur <caeruleancentaur@...> wrote:
> > >
> > >> >veritosproject@... wrote:
> > >>
> > >> >How do you guys pronounce /track/?  I heard a couple Americans saying
> > >> >[tSr\&k], and I was just wondering where that [S] came from.  I
> > >> >actually pronounced it that way until recently, when I consciously
> > >> >tried stopping.
> > >>
> > >> Boy, you never realize until someone points it out.  It's [tSr\&k] for
I noticed it when I was in primary school. I found it interesting to
note that "tr" spelt (what I thought of as) /chr/, which allowed "chr"
to spell (what I thought of as) /cr/, and allowed "kr" and "cr" (as I
thought then) to be unused.

I've generally considered it phonemic for me, at least! (At least
until I stopped considering the concept of "phonemic" to be useful.)

...

> Hmmm ... Yes, it may occur in Australia, but
> IME uncommonly.  If it did, it would be poorly
> regarded by our English teachers (I think!)
Oh not at all! I definitely say [tSr\&k] (as noted above), and it
seems very common to me. The process extends so far that my peers from
the outer suburbs on the Other Side of Town, out near Dandenong,
Ringwood etc. (I assume you're Melburnian from your ISP) pronounce my
name in such ways as [tSr\ISt@n] or [tSr\IStS@n]! (The other option,
[tSr\IstS@n], IME does not occur except by people who think my name is
"Tristian".)

Also, I've noticed that young children (who have not yet mastered
clusters, but do have the [tS] affricative) frequently ommit the [r\]
entirely and speak of the [tS&in tS&k].

(I occasionally also say [tSweni] for "twenty", but I think that's
much less common, and for me only occurs when I'm speaking particu'ly
fast.)

> The teacher I wrote of the other day - who
> last taught in the early sixties!  - used to have
> fits over what she called "poor enunciation".
Well, that's certainly nothing like modern English teachers! English
teachers are much more in[tSr\]ested in teaching us nowadays how to
write essays, read editorials and understand advertising. They have
little interest in teaching correct pronunciation (except so that
poe[tSr\]y remains poetic), unless you are a non-native speaker and
need [tS]uition on the matter.

(My mother is an English teacher, and I was in year 12 in 2002, which
simultaneously seems a long time ago, and like yesterday.)

...
> If we *are* speeding up our language, then we
> would necessarily start to blur, merge and even
> lose some articulations, wouldn't we?  That
> might account for:
> [tr&:k] > [t_ar\&:k] > [tSr\&:k].
I'm intrigued as to why you note length in these. There should
especially be no length in the last one, if the rate of speech is
picking up :)

--
Tristan.

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