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

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.

Doug

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