* On 2006-03-16 18:59:06 +0100 Mark J. Reed wrote:
> One thing that I only became aware of after reading JC Wells' book is
> that there are several sounds I had thought of as foreign, non-English
> sounds, that actually occur in my own everyday variety of English!
/snip examples/
>
> Then there's the rampant labialization, palatalization, and
> nasalization! "Queen" may be /kwin/ phonemically, but it comes out as
> [k_w_hi~J_}]. Holy crap!
>
> Anyone else had an experience like this? Maybe if I'd had more than
> one quarter of linguistics in college I would have had this a-ha
> moment in class instead of when I read the book, but it really sort of
> blew me away.
Have you tried recording yourself and making spectrograms (with for
instance Praat <http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/>)? Amazing what weird
stuff becomes visible that way. Sounds that are voiced when they
shouldn't, weird approximants etc.
t.