Re: English /T/, was Re: Spanish ll in different dialects

Doug Dee wrote:

>In a message dated 8/28/2004 10:04:49 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
>joe@WANTAGE.COM writes:
>Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
>
>
>
>>>Ben Poplawski wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>Maybe it was a personal variation: a lisp. It was weird, sounded halfway
>>>>between [T] and [f] sometimes.
>>>>
>>>>Ben
>>>>
>>>>
>>>Probably because it was interdental rather than post-dental.
>>>(Tongue between the teeth rather than behind the upper teeth.
>>>
>>>
>
>
>
>
>>But...English [T] is interdental.  Don't you mean the other way round?
>>
>>
>
>IIRC . . . When I was in college, one of my linguistics professors (William
>Labov), mentioned that for most speakers of American English, the /T/ phoneme
>is generally not pronounced as an interdental -- the tongue doesn't actually
>protrude between the teeth.  (He mentioned that most black Americans do have an
>interdental.)
>
>This seems to be a case where the traditional description hasn't caught up to
>drifts in pronunciation.
>
>
Yeah, but I speak British English ;-)

Replies