Miguel:
>It's indeed a question of voice onset time and tongue position.
>Mandarin and English /d/ are unvoiced, while French /d/ is voiced.
That's not correct.
French /d/ and English /d/, **being both voiced**, differ in terms
of the tongue position and the timing of their voicing onset. From
what I know, Mandarin is indeed unvoiced however voicing onset
isn't written in stone and I'm sure you could get away with a
little voicing even in Mandarin -- nobody'll know the difference.
But in general, Mandarin /d/ and /t/ differ in aspiration as we
find in Sumerian or Etruscan.
>Because the relative frequencies of the first and second formants
>I discussed apply to _all_ varieties of /m/ and /n/.
Alright, I'll take this for granted for now.
>Nasalization and raising are two independent effects caused by
>nasals. Nasalized vowels of the French variety [...]
>are lowered and backed in relation to oral vowels,[...]
Yes, but your myriad of conflicting examples illustrates that
there is no correlation between height and nasalization. So
this works against your assertions.
- gLeN
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