Re: Re[4]: [tied] More nonsense: Is English /d/ truely voiced?

Piotr:

>Phoneticians point out that actual voicing is often absent (even
>completely absent) in the production of those sounds in English, and yet
>there are enough acoustic cues to enable the hearer to perceive the
>intended contrast (except when a full merger does take place, e.g.
>intervocalically in American accents).

Thanks for the lucid explanation but what I'm confused about is that,
at least with myself, I swear that "voicing" (ie: vibration of the vocal
chords) does in fact go on for most instances of /d/. It's not just
that there are "cues" that "suggest" voicing. It seems to me that I'm
actually voicing /d/ in the true sense of the word (unless I whisper,
of course), not to the extent of French /d/ but the voicing is still
present. Therefore, I view English /d/ to be a voiced phoneme on every
level in a majority of instances.

>Like everybody else, I'm quite happy with [voice] as a conventional
>distinctive feature, provided that one keeps in mind and is ready to admit
>that (a) distinctive features are abstract and refer to "ideal"
>realisations, which may rarely if ever occur in actual speech, (b) the
>phonetic implementation of [voice] varies from accent to accent and from
>language to language, and phonological [voice] is not to be identified
>with modal voice as defined in terms of articulatory phonetics.

At any rate, I think I understand you and I'm agreeing with the above.


- gLeN


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