Re: Linguistic Terminology

In message <36901348.EEE6F736@...>, Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
writes
>John Fisher wrote:
>> It's an old question, but a good one: why do we call this an allophone
>> of /t/, and not of /d/?  After all, in my accent at least, an initial
>> /d/, in 'duck' for example, is barely voiced, if at all.  The main
>> salient difference acoustically is in the aspiration.  So why shouldn't
>> we say that that 'still', for example, is /sdIl/ rather than /stIl/?
>
>For me, and, I suspect, most dialects, initial /d/ is always voiced, tho
>partially unvoiced.  Aspiration increases the difference, but it is not
>the sole, or even salient, difference - voicing is.
Heh heh.  I would only accept this if there are perceptual experiments
to prove it.  I suspect that an unvoiced unaspirated initial [t] would
be interpreted by most English speakers as /d/.

But my *real* point was that I'm far from convinced by the idea of a
language having a simple list of phonemes, and that anything that
happens can or should be tied to one of its members.  The fact is that
there is *no* functional distinction between /t/ and /d/ in the
environment s_V, so to identify it as one or the other is not easy to
justify, IMHO.  That is not a distinction which operates in that
environment in English.

--
John Fisher   john@drummond.demon.co.uk   johnf@epcc.ed.ac.uk
Elet Anta website: http://www.drummond.demon.co.uk/anta/
Drummond ro cleshfan merec; fanye litoc, inye litoc