At 9:36:27 PM on Saturday, April 10, 2004,
enlil@... wrote:
>>> In French, everything is dental, including /s/.
>> No it isn't. /t/ and /d/ are dental, /s/ /z/ /l/ (and
>> formerly /r/) are alveolar.
> Pretty funny as how I'm pronouncing [s] differently in
> English than I am in French, eh? Pretty funny considering
> that my mother tongue is in fact English.
The fact that you pronounce them differently doesn't imply
that your French [s] is dental. You might also want to take
a look at
<
http://www.cog.jhu.edu/pdf/gafos_dissertation-chapter_04.pdf>:
It is known that 50% of California English speakers
produce [s] as an apical sound and 50% as a laminal one.
The same distribution applies to [S]. Dart (1991) has
also shown that the place of articulation of [s] in both
English and French varies considerably from speaker to
speaker, being articulated with a constriction that varies
from as far forward as the dental zone to as far back as
the post-alveolar zone.
Brian