Re: USAGE: Voiced/voiceless stops in English, was: Re: Pronouncing Tokana...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU]On
> Behalf Of John Cowan
> Sent: Tuesday, February 1, 2000 9:33 AM
> To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
> Subject: Re: Voiced/voiceless stops in English, was: Re: Pronouncing
> Tokana...
>
>
> Vasiliy Chernov wrote:
>
> > E. g., what happens in examples like:
> >
> > a tall man
> > at all
> > a dawn
> > had altered
> >
> > - in American English?
>
> "A tall man" is pronounced with aspirated t, [@ thOl m&n].  The others
> are pronounced with a flap: [@*Ol], [@*On], [h&*OltRd], where R is
> the American R approximant, and * is the flap-r of Spanish "r".
> A Hispanic-American friend of mine named "Taira" usually
> gets her name heard as "Tide-a" by anglophones.
>
> Most dialects of British English, including RP, don't have this flap.
> Note that voicing differences are lost: both /t/ and /d/ are flapped.
Is this universal in the American (or other) dialects that merge /t/ and /d/
in that position? A friend of mine argues that that's the case in the
Midwest where we live, but I tend to disagree. Is the /d/ in <dawn> really
different from the /d/ in <a dawn>? I know that, for example, <little> and
<Liddle> sound exactly the same in my idiolect, but I always thought they
both used [d]. Could I be wrong? ;)

Also, when I pronounce the Spanish flap r, as in <Taira>, it doesn't sound
exactly like the [d] in <tide>.

Eric Christopherson
raccoon@elknet.net