Piotr:
>In some Scottish and Northern English accents (especially from
>the Pennines) there's little or no aspiration of initial voiceless stops.
>Anyone accustomed to typical RP allophones may
>easily mishear the /p, t, k, tS/ of those accents as /b, d, g, dZ/.
Thanks, Piotr, but aggravatingly for me, I'm not denying any of
this! I accept what you're saying and I accept that there are such
variants in English. I accept the other variants that have been
shown on this List by other members as well.
All I'm trying to say is that if you're going to refer to English
/d/ as a "voiced stop" (and there is ample literature calling
it such) then why would it be voiceless on a whole?? Are List
members trying to convince me that the "English voiced stop"
is a misnomer?? What on earth are people trying to convince me?
From what I see, taking ALL the cases of a surface /d/ in ALL
positions, in ALL dialects of English, the majority of cases
should show that /d/ is voiced, whether "fully" or "partially"
(whatever those vague terms mean) -- ie: [d], [td-] or [-dt],
all technically voiced because voice occurs during closure.
I object to saying that English /d/ is voiceless (ie: [t]).
That's not common English. Again, I'm talking about English in
GENERAL. Not about some specific dialect but about ALL dialects
at once. Not about specific positions like initial either, but
ALL positions in general. The OVERALL picture of /d/ in English
is a voiced phoneme.
- gLeN
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