Re: New Try from a New Guy

[Hi everyone.  Back on for the holidays.]

Quoting Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>:

> On Sat, 14 Dec 2002 20:27:56 +0100 Christian Thalmann <cinga@...>
> writes:
> > --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Michael David Martin <mdmartin@i...>
> > wrote: Do /s/ and /T/ have [z] and [D] as allophones, or are they
> > always [s] and [T]?
Are we talking about English here? Certainly in English [z]
and [D] are phones of distinct phonemes /z/ and /D/.

> Talking about /s/ being realized as [z]... Last night me and a few
> friends watched the video version of the musical "Joseph and the Amazing
> Technicolor Dreamcoat", and i was surprised to hear every single person
> in it pronounce the name |Joseph| with a [z].  I've only ever heard [s]
> in that name before.  Is that because the people i know are closer to the
> Hebrew form [josef], while officially the English version actually has
> [z]?  Or does the English name itself have dialectal variants?
I've always pronounced, and heard, it as [dZou(z@f]. But it
appears that there is some dialectal variation, [s] being the
only other alternant.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637