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Re: My Apologies about Mysterious sounds

From:Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...>
Date:Tuesday, October 5, 2004, 21:04
Isaac A. Penzev wrote:

>Chris Bates wrote: > > > > >>I get English, Spanish (well, one dialect of Spanish... the rest just >>pronounce it s)... *thinks* what else am I missing? I know there are >>lots more... Arabic has it doesn't it? I might be wrong about that one... >> >> > >I can add Arabic, Swahili, Mn Greek, Bashkir, Turkmen (not sure about this >one). > > >
Most speakers of Swahili don't get T or D right... its a sound in borrowed Arabic words (which there are a great many of) I believe, they tend to become other sounds in the speech of most people (also because its widely spoken as a trade language, and most other people who learn it don't have T or D in their native languages). In an awful lot of languages with T and D the trend seems to have been to eliminate them... I already mentioned Spanish in which a lot of dialects have changed T to s, and Swahili, and even in English the trend around my area in colloquial speech (Midlands) is to eliminate T in favour of f. The same trend is much more widespread in the north, and many of my northern (as in northern england) friends at university simply can't manage to pronounce T. Its always f in their speech. For some reason T isn't popular... but its one of the sounds I like most in English. :) I dislike the way people who pronounce it f sound, but that use seems to be growing. :(

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Douglas Koller, Latin & French <latinfrench@...>/T/, /D/ Re: My Apologies about Mysterious sounds