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Slightly OT, but can you all, in your various area accents, hear a difference between "grade 'A'" and "gray day?"
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<<Slightly OT, but can you all, in your various area accents, hear a difference between "grade 'A'" and "gray day?">>
It's completely off topic. But yes, in my accent - and pretty much any North American accent - there's an appreciable difference because the /d/ in "grade A" undergoes flapping, whereas the /d/ in "gray day" does not:
grade A [%gr\eI4 "eI]
gray day [%gr\eI "deI]
But even in a non-North American accent that didn't have allophonic flapping, I'm certain that the difference would still be audible.
Regarding "flaccid": the archaic or traditional pronunciation was /"fl{ksId/, but I think /"fl{sId/ is now predominant in all dialects. The Cambridge Online Dictionary only gives the latter.
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<<But yes, in my accent - and pretty much any North American accent - there's an appreciable difference because the /d/ in "grade A" undergoes flapping, whereas the /d/ in "gray day" does not.>>
That's interesting. I don't have flapping here, because 'A' is fully stressed (it even has an initial glottal stop). The two don't sound quite the same because of the slight diphthongal movements in opposite directions in closed and open syllables, and the initial glottal stop:
[gv\ee_od ?ee_r] grade A
[gv\ee_r dee_r] gray day
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Hmm. I regularly have flapping like that before stressed vowels. Would you have flapping for /t/ in a similar position?
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Pretty much what I expected. In southern American English, the "d" elides into the "a" in "day." Over the years, I've asked a number of English speakers in this region if they could discern a difference and none of them have been able. So it's a regionalism...
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I don't believe I pronounce them differently (Texan, lived in California for four years, just moved to Louisiana).
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I'm in Huntsville (extreme north) Alabama. Our accents, unless we modify them, would be very close...
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