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bsuvc.bsu.edu>For those who require "intersubjective verification" of Alexis' claim that it is possible to HEAR the difference between [t+S] and [tS], I can hear it. (I can't address the German facts because I don't know it well enough, unfortunately.) I have heard at least one French pronunciation of the bit before the vowel in the country spelled "Tchad" in which this was VERY different from English pronunciations of the bit before the vowel in "Chad" -- and this difference seemed to be clearly [t+S] vs. [tS]. (This seems to contradict what Alexis says about "Tchekoff" -- interspeaker differences? Speaking of which, English speakers I have heard have [s] at the beginning of "tsunami" (and [t] in "tsetse"!).) By the way, both of these sound different from geminate affricates, like the [ttS] in Hausa _waccan_ "that (one), fem.". As to the phonetic difference, although I have not done any instrumental work, I would be very surprised if it was not durational differences, at least of the frication part (probably closure too when it's possible to tell) -- considerably longer for [t+S]. (Geminate affricates have longer closures than simplex affricates, and (near?) identical frication durations.) Also, some dialects of Fula are described as having CONTRASTS among (tautosyllabic) prenasalized stops, (heterosyllabic) nasal + stop, nasal + prenasal, and geminate prenasalized stops. (I may be wrong about one of these, but there is at least a three-way contrast; I believe that the variety described in D. W. Arnott's _The nominal and verbal systems of Fula_ has all four.) Since Fula speakers presumably can hear these differences, the two-way Polish [t+S]/[tS] contrast ought to be a "piece of cake"! At the risk of trodding away from phonetics toward phonology/psychology, the subject of prenasals brings to mind an incident that may be of interest to those who do not happen to have taught phonetics using Ladefoged's _Course ..._ to a class that included (perceptive) native speakers of Russian and Zulu (or their equivalent for the following purposes). In the course of discussing "different types of stops" (pp. 165-6), L gives as an example of a stop "with nasal release" the Russian [dno] `bottom'. The Russian speaker pointed out, with absolutely no prompting, that this [dn], unlike the first seven examples that it followed, was a sequence of TWO segments. At which point, the Zulu speaker noted, equally spontaneously, that the next example, a (Swahili) prenasalized stop ([ndizi] `banana'), was NOT a sequence of two segments, at least in Zulu (despite the biliteral orthography!). SOME people, whether for phonetic reasons or phonological ones, apparently have no trouble deciding whether or not they are dealing with a sequence of segments. I will now turn directly to phonology, in particular, how one might decide how to represent the above phonetic things phonologically. It depends in part on whether one takes a "God's truth" or a "hocus pocus" approach (in Householder's sense) to linguistic analysis. If the latter, then anything goes: why worry if pure complementary distribution criteria result in an analysis in which English [h] and [N] (the velar nasal) are allophones of the same phoneme (the former occurs only syllable-initially, the latter syllable-finally), regardless of how counter-intuitive it is to native speakers? We have a compact description of the phonetic facts (and reduce the number of phonemes by one!) If the former, and if we're lucky, we'll have an informant with strong intuitions (and if we're REAL lucky, these intuitions contradict what we'd expect based on the orthography, like in the Zulu case mentioned above). If we're not so lucky, and if the "God's truth" we're seeking is "how native speakers represent these things in their mental dictionaries", then we'll have to (gasp!) do some work. We can't assume that traditional linguistic criteria will work; many of them have been conceived by folks who took (or claimed they did) a "hocus pocus" approach, after all. We might try to find people who are "fluent backward talkers" (as Cowan and Leavitt did -- see, most accessibly for linguists, their 1981 CLS Parasession on Language and Behavior paper) -- ones who can pronounce words with the order of phonemes reversed, and as fast as simultaneous translators do their trick -- and see if they behave like "other" sequences of segments [they don't, in English!]. Or see if children who invent their own spelling systems ever treat them as if they are "t" plus whatever they use for [S] (which, alas, does not occur in the name of any English letter, unless you count the post-vowel part of "h" -- and kids don't seem to), as unfortunately Charles Read did not do in his 1975 _Children's categorization of speech sounds in English_. Or look at speech errors (N. Davidsen-Nielsen, 1975 J IPA [sorry, Jim Fidelholz, I don't KNOW what his/her first name is!]. Etc., etc. But knowing the etymology (and Alexis meant this literally, Benji -- as in David Powers' claim that `"tschuess" ... derives from =EO dieu or adios ...') is irrelevant to what's in most folks's mental dictionaries (and, as Alexis notes, irrelevant to ANYbody's phonetics). Don Churma, Dept. of English, Ball State University, Muncie, IN 47306Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue