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Why don't words like butter and bottle don't have sound t?
Why do such words (butter, bottle, cattle, etc.) get pronounced with "l" or sometimes "r" instead of "t"?
If they're pronounced with the "l" sound, then why don't they just change the spelling into something like burrer (butter), bollel (bottle), or carrel (cattle)?
Hmm? They don't sound anything like any of those in the dialect I speak (a typical American English dialect). It would be closer to "budder", "boddle", and "caddle".
The matter is not what the sound is, but rather that of perception. Most English-speakers perceive it as an allophone of /d/ (my dialect is an exception due to my preserving vowel length before /t/ and /d/ when they are realized as [4]), whereas Soupi is clearly a native speaker of a language where [4] is considered to be a rhotic (which is most likely Spanish for an initial guess). Consequently Soupi thinks it should be spelled with "r" while furrykey thinks it is closer to "d" even though the actual sound being represented is the same, being [4].
<<Is Travis Soupi, I wonder? >>
Am I Travis? What do you mean by that? I don't understand what you mean. Anyway, Travis- I forgot to also ask why "d" in words like caddle, muddle, etc. is also pronounced as how "t" in cattle, butter, etc. is pronounced. They sound the same, aren't they?
If they're a Spanish speaker, I can understand. I used to sit next to a Peruvian girl at work, and she said a proper R was pronounced like D. Since both the American -- what is it? intervocalic T -- and the Spanish R are both uvular flaps, or whatever they're called, it makes sense that one might be interpreted as the other.
Josh Lalonde, I'm a native speaker of Korean, not Japanese. The Korean and Japanese languages are very similar in many aspects.
I checked out the wikipedia link, and it's quite informative. Thanks for your post.
>>As you wrote later, this process also applies to /d/, at least in the US, making words like 'latter' and 'ladder' the same for many Americans, something like ["l{4@`].<<
On that note, I wonder what the distribution of "early" vowel length allophony versus "late" vowel length allophony is in North American English dialects (by "early" versus "late" I mean whether the point in the phonology at which such occurs is close to the underlying forms or close to realization). It seems that most dialects have late vowel length allophony, while my dialect has early vowel length allophony, explaining why "latter" and "ladder" are homophones for very many North Americans, while for me they are distinguished by vowel length. |