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

Me:

>With me, I think a reasonable transcription of my pronunciation
>of "cat" and "cad" would be [kHa.t] and [kHa?].

Miguel:

>Viceversa, no?

Ah yes. Sorry, I mean to say "cat" = [kHa?] and "cad" = [kHa.t].

>All I can say is "show me a spectrogram". By all accounts,
>sentence initial /b/, /d/, /g/ are voiceless/devoiced both in
>RP and AE in normal speech (certain Northern English and Scots
>dialects have truly voiced initial stops).

I'm neither British nor American so RP and AE may not have
bearing on my speech pattern. It may sound strange but Canada
is still a seperate country from the US.


Me:

>In fact, I have even caught myself being lazy, voicing voiceless medial
>stops as well.

Miguel:

>Yes, pronouncing intervocal /t/ as [r*] (alveolar flap/tap)
>is common in North American English (and not only there).

No, no. I mean actual medial _stops_. An example would be
"lacking" where I might almost say ['lAgN]. Again, there
is still the vowel length difference between "lacking" and
"lagging" ['lA.gN] to save me just in case I do get lazy.
I assume that what I'm doing is I'm subconsciously
generalizing the "metal/medal" thing to all medial stops
including -k-/-g- and -p-/-b-. Sometimes it just comes out.


- gLeN


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