----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, April 16, 2000 10:31
AM
Subject: [phoNet] Assimilation of
English consonants
Thereis no
inconsistency here, just different preferences. Different languages permit
different kinds of assimilation. English has no (or very little) voicing
assimilation, which is obligatory in Lithuanian, Russian or Polish (I have
ryba 'fish' with [b], but rybka 'little
fish' with [p], as well as devoicing before a pause). This is why speakers of
these language have to deliberately practise the pronunciation of English
words like anecdote /kd/, phases like
backbone /k#b/ "minimal pairs" like dog :
dock, etc., until they "unlearn" their native habits while
speaking English.
On the other
hand, English consonants (especially the alveolar ones, articulated with the
tip of the tongue) easily assimilate to the PLACE of articulation of the
following consonant. The pronunciation of bad boy as "bab
boy" or good girl as "goog girl" can
frequently be heard in casual speech. This assimilation is facilitated by the
fact that English stops are normally unreleased (there is no "puff" of breath)
before another stop, so the acoustic contrast between them is weakened in this
position. A speaker of British English will typically pronounce the /n/
in one thirty as a dental nasal, assimilating it to the
following dental fricative [θ], but in one reason the same
/n/ will be postalveolar (with the tip of the tongue retracted or curled
back), assimilating to the following /r/, which is pronounced as a
postalveolar liquid.
The
palatalisation of alveolar stops and fricatives before "y"
/j/, "sh" /ʃ/, "ch"/ʧ/, "j"
/ʤ/ (palatal or palato-alveolar consonants) is one of the most widespread
kinds of assimilation in English; it affects /s, z, t, d/, which change into
/ʃ, ʒ, ʧ, ʤ/ respectively:
this
year > "thish year" [ðɪʃ'jɪə] or
[ðɪ'ʃɪə]
horse-shoe >
"horsh-shoe" or even "horshoe"
would you like >
['wʊʤə'laɪk]
nice
journey > ['naɪʃ'ʤɜnɪ]
is George >
[ɪʒ'ʤɔ:ʤ] without your help
> [wɪð'aʊʧɔ:'help] or [wɪð'aʊʧə'help]
Sometimes American and British English have
different preferences with regard to palatal assimilation, e.g.
Parisian usually has [zj] in RP (the standard British accent) but [ʒ] in
General American.
In its
early history Lithuanian also had palatal assimilations affecting
combinations of consonants with /j/; these palatalisations have become
"fossilised" as morphological alternations though they are no longer active
phonetic processes:
pavydėti 'to envy' :
pavydžiu (1 sg.), with dž [ʤ] <
Proto-Baltic dj
Piotr
Juozas wrote:
I haven't devoted much time to English phonetics and it seems pretty
inconsistent to me, at least in the assimilation field. For example,
the "g" sound in "dogpile" doesn't seem to turn into "k" ("dokpile"),
whereas "it was just him" turns into "it wazh just him", so the whole
thing is quite confusing. In Lithuanian there are such pairs of
consonants:
b - p
d - t
g - k
z - s
zh - sh
j (the
one in "John") - ch
The pairs mean, say, if "b" stands before any
voiceless consonant it
becomes "p" and vice versa. Where I could find the
list of similar
English consonant pairs? And it's not pure theory: if
someone's
ignoring consonant assimilation while speaking Lithuanian, it's
clearly heard and unnatural (possibly same with English?).
Juozas
Rimas