Dear Colleagues:  Pronunciation is such an important issue in ESL.  This is the second time in the short time I have been a poster that this subject has come up and has received so many responses.  Are telling ourselves something?  Bonnita

zazie <zazee27 at yahoo.com> wrote: It is not the case that certain "accents" *replace*
the /d/ sound with a /t/ sound after an unvoiced
consonent (when spelling seems to indicate a /d/
sound, for example, in a past tense).  The only way to
make a voiced sound would be to add another syllable. 
We hear this today only in archaic language such as
that of the Christmas carol, "The First Noel":
    They look-ed up and saw a star....

This is the only way a /d/ sound can be added to the
unvoiced /k/.  If these words originally had the extra
syllable, that pronunciation has been lost over time,
so that now the past tense is indicated with a /t/
sound (after unvoiced consonents K, F, P, S, although
it is still written with "ed."
     looked    laughed    stopped     erased
After the unvoiced sound of T itself, we of course
must make an extra syllable ("waited," for example) as
it is impossible to say "waitd."

It helps to think of sound first, and writing
(orthography) as what illustrates the sound (to some
degree), rather than the other way around.  
English is not the only language that presents such
problems.  If you learned French by ear only, you'd
have a shock when you then had to write it.  What you
might have expected to be written as (using English
spelling for convenience):

       seh lu pree

is really

      c'est le prix

Were the final letters once pronounced and now lost?
Or are they something separate from speech?   Chicken
or egg?



Zazie


 
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