I’m with JKellyMap on this one.
I very clearly hear 1,2, and 3 as ch. Four is the only t.
Joe
I’m trying to test the claim that the t in tr can be discerned as a t as opposed to a ch. If I’m wrong, then since playing the first bit of a t never yields a sound mistakeable for a ch, it should be that playing the first bit of a tr never yields a sound mistakeable for a ch.
If people are hearing “ch” instead of “t” then this would seem to be evidence that t before r is pronounced with a ch sound. (But as I said in the OP, this poll won’t be definitive since people will be able to claim that though the truck guy in the other thread is saying ‘t’, the person in the sound clips in this thread is saying ‘ch’ instead.
I think the ‘truck’ guy is saying ‘ch’ just as manifestly and obviously as the person in this thread is also saying ‘ch’ but I haven’t thought of a way to prove it.
In any case, I did try to make these clips objectively evaluable in at least one way–I cut off each clip at exactly the same point. (.09 seconds.)
Didn’t read the article but based on your comment and the abstract, I’m not sure it applies here: I’m not asking people what their internal phenomenology is like, I’m asking people what sound is being made.
I’ll tell you guys what words I used, and from where, sometime around 7 or 8 EST. Sorry to make you wait–simply put, I don’t remember what words they were, and the list is on my laptop at home.
I’d like to point out two items which reflect on just *how similar *the position of the mouthparts are for the unvoiced dental stop “t” compared with the unvoiced dental affricate “ch”. The first is a brief extract from Ladefoged and Maddieson’s The Sounds of the World’s Languages (page 90):
“In almost every case, as a stop is released the articulators will pass briefly through a position in which the constriction is narrow enough that it will cause turbulence in the air at the constriction site. This transitory friction is usually considered a part of the release burst of the stop. Affricates are stops in which the release of the constriction is modified in such a way as to produce a more prolonged period of frication after the release.”
The other item is my unprofessional observation that the VOICED dental stop/affricate pair – “d” vs. the “g/j” sound in “orgy”-- are so close that when one is found in Spanish, the other is often found in the closely related language of Portuguese (and spelled “d” in both). For example, Spanish ciudad “seeoo-DAHD” (“city”) is cognate to Portuguese cidade “see-DODGY”.
(Since this -d/-de ending is rather common in both languages, to my Spanish-tuned ears Portuguese sometimes sounds something like “mangy Angie’s dodgy orgy”.)
This isn’t illustrative of your point. I make a ts sound, not a ch sound, by modifying “the release of the constriction… in such a way as to produce a more prolonged period of frication after the release” of the dental stop.
Sure, they’re close. But they’re distinct, however close they may be. In my own mouth, by a visual estimation, I’d say there’s at least a half a centimeter of difference in position of contact between tongue and roof of mouth.
You may be on to something there…Ladefoged WAS talking about “ch” here, but you’re right in that, in order to get “ch” during the frication, you need to hold the sides of your tongue tight to the back of the upper teeth (the molars and a bit forward from there). If you DON’T keep that tightness, you slip into an “s”. So, we’re talking about exactly which part(s) of the “constriction” is/are “released”.
Agreed. Just pointing out other clues (especially for some Dopers who may still be incredulus about the whole thing) that the “t/ch” connection isn’t just random (nor is it phantom).
Aha. #2 must be an example of pronouncing ‘tr’ as ‘chr’, as in “chruck” instead of “truck.”
Only #4.
As is the “truck” clip in the other thread! 