Summary Details
| Query: |
American Pronunciation
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| Author: | Larry Trask | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Phonology
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| Summary: |
A few days ago, I posted a question about the transcription of
American pronunciation. This arose out of the decision of the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary to transcribe the American ''tapped /t/'' (''flapped /t/'') with the symbol /d/, thus making the transcription of 'atom', for example, identical to that of 'Adam'. I expressed my disapproval of this decision, and asked for the views of others. I received replies from 50 people, most (but not all) of them linguists or phoneticians, and most (but not all) of them native speakers of American English. In addition, two respondents consulted friends or spouses who had no linguistic training, giving a total of 52 respondents. First, I have tried to classify the respondents according to their opinion of the OED's decision -- with a little difficulty in a few cases. Here are the numbers. 37 Utterly hostile to the use of /d/ 7 Skeptical about /d/, but not wholly hostile 1 Sympathetic, but still skeptical 3 Sympathetic to the use of /d/ 4 I can't tell 52 Total Now, I can't pretend that my sample is representative of American opinion on this point, but it is clear that there exists a great deal of dissatisfaction with the OED's decision. Accordingly, I propose to pass the comments on to the editors of the OED and to ask them to reconsider their decision. A number of points were raised by the respondents. Here are some. 1. For many (most?) American speakers, the tapped t is neither /d/ nor [d]; it does not sound like /d/ or [d]; it is not perceived as /d/ or [d]; and the use of /d/ is widely perceived as just plain wrong. A few respondents find the suggested use of /d/ to be patronizing or even offensive: it looks to them like an Englishman's confused idea of American pronunciation. And, quite apart from bewildering Americans, such use of /d/ will badly confuse non-Americans about what's going on. 2. Pairs like 'atom' and 'Adam', while phonetically homophonous for many speakers in casual speech and for some speakers even in careful speech, are not phonetically homophonous for everybody. Even in the most casual speech, some speakers report that they consistently use a voiceless tap for /t/ but never for /d/, and some speakers report that they consistently make the familiar distinction of vowel length, with a longer first vowel in 'Adam' than in 'atom'. 3. Even for speakers for whom 'atom' and 'Adam' are phonetically identical in very casual speech, they are often not homophonous in even slightly careful speech. And basing the transcription wholly on maximally casual styles, with no attention to other styles, is out of order. 4. The most salient phonetic feature of the tap is not, as the editors suggest, its voicing -- which need not even be present -- but rather its shortness. 5. The tapping (flapping) of /t/ is entirely predictable by rule, and it does not need to be represented in a transcription, since native speakers will apply the tapping automatically where it is normal. 6. Transcribing, say, 'atom' with /d/ but its derivative 'atomic' with /t/ will give the impression of an alternation which does not in fact exist. The same goes for inflected forms like 'write' and 'writing'. And, of course, even 'write' gets a tapped /t/ when followed by a vowel, as 'write a letter'. 7. Transcribing both tapped /t/ and tapped /d/ as /d/ will produce chaos with all those pairs of words which are phonetically distinct for perhaps all Americans in perhaps all styles, such as 'waiting'/'wading' and 'writer'/'rider' -- unless further steps are taken to represent the phonetically distinct vocalic nuclei here. 8. Of all the many phonetic details typical of American and other accents, there is little reason to single out this one for explicit representation. What about the many other details, such as the nasal tap used by many Americans for intervocalic /n/, and the interesting (and varied) American treatment of the cluster /nt/ in words like 'winter'? 9. If explicit representation of the tap is considered to be essential, then either the IPA fishhook or the established American stopgap [D] would be preferable to the misleading /d/. 10. Merriam-Webster's Third International dictionary used /d/ for tapped /t/, and this decision was received with some hostility. That's about it. My thanks to Matthew Baerman, Donn Bayard, Gordon Brown, Susan Burt, Karen Chung, Jodie Clark, Douglas Dee, Jeanette Denton, Ivan Derzhanski, Dorothy Disterheft, Dirk Elzinga, Yehuda Falk, Paul Fallon, Daniel Faulkner, Antony Green, Charles Gribble, Jorge Guitart, Carlos Gussenhoven, Rob Hagiwara, Clyde Hankey, S. J. Hannahs, Kirk Hazen, Robert Hoberman, Mika Hoffman, Alan Huffman, Jim Jenkins, Roger Lass, Katalin Mady, Mark Mandel, Bart Mathias, Joyce Milambiling, Corey Miller, Keith Miller, William Morris, Geoffrey Nathan, Chad Nilep, Marc Picard, Elizabeth Pyatt, Harold Schiffman, Robert Trammell, Martha Tyrone, Karen van Hoek, Josefina Vitale, Chris Wallraff, Natasha Warner, Dick Watson, Adam Werle, Stanley Whitley, Lynell Williams, and Richard Wright. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt@cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) |
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| LL Issue: | 12.2228 | |
| Date Posted: | 13-Sep-2001 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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