Brian:
> The fact that you pronounce them differently doesn't imply
> that your French [s] is dental.
When I pronounce English with an alveolar it does and when
I'm an Anglophone that never grew up with apicodentals
except in my french immersion classes... yeah, it does
imply it and French uses dental stops as well.
From: <
http://www.cog.jhu.edu/pdf/gafos_dissertation-chapter_04.pdf>
Brian quotes:
> It is known that 50% of California English speakers
> produce [s] as an apical sound and 50% as a laminal one.
So? I'm not Californian. I use an _alveolar_ like most North
Americans. No apico-anything except... when I speak French.
When I say "sue" in English, the "s" is alveolar and the "u"
sound is weakly pronounced, more like [&U] than [&w].
However, when I say "sous" in French, it sounds quite
different. The "s" is apicodental and the "u" I pronounce
is with lips rounded much more than I ever would in English.
In Mandarin it's different again and I find myself pronouncing
"u" with an o-ish quality, lower than I would in French
and the s is alveolar... but I don't know whether Mandarin
speakers actually use alveolar "s"'s, I never looked it up
and I was never immersed in Mandarin at school like I was
in French :P
The point is, I wouldn't adopt two very very different ways
of pronouncing things unless I heard and mimicked other
francophones do just that. Apicodental sibilants aren't
typical in English. We're taught in linguistics that
English generally uses alveolar s's, ignoring the lesser
regional tendencies that may exist.
Having been immersed in French throughout my childhood at
school, I'm confident that I'm pronouncing the "s" properly
and that it _isn't_ typically alveolar in French. I can
hear the difference very much.
> 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.
And I'm not really arguing that point much because I realize
that there is variation and nothing is written in stone.
However, it remains that English typically has an alveolar
sibilant, French an apicodental. I have heard some French
people pronounce their "s"'s like [S] so of course this is
true but it's not the overall state of affairs. Afterall,
sometimes people's dentures get in the way :)
= gLeN