On 3/16/06, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> 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!
> This came as something as a shock, but I cannot dispute it. Careful
> attention to my speech reveals, for instance, that the word
> "cucumber", which I think of as beginning with /kj/, actually comes
> out of my mouth with an aspirated palatal affricate [c_hC], although
> the initial stop feels closer to [k] than [c] - maybe it's [k_j]. And
Hmm...I seem to pronounce it similarly.
> while words like "huge" and "human" normally have a real [hj] cluster
> to match my phonemic /hj/, they likewise occasionally start with [C]
> instead- perhaps an overcorrection in my desire to avoid the
> to-me-distasteful (despite being historically correct!) pronunciation
> with a bare initial [j].
[judZ] and [jumen] for me. See previous email...I've always been a
bit vowel-differences deaf.
>
> 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!
[kujn] for me...weird.