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The sentence "The voiceless postalveolar affricate also occurs as an allophone of /t/ before approximants, in words such as trickortwin" was added and then deleted with the comment "Sorry, Denelson, but a twin sounds nothing like at Schwinn. What you're hearing is aspiration and a voiceless approximant, not a fricative."
I definitely have something like [tʃ]intrick. Indeed, I'd go further, and say that I have /tʃ/ - my intuition definitely identifies the sound at the beginning of trick with that in chick and not that in tick. I remember being surprised several years ago, when working out the non-IPA pronunciation scheme used in Chambers dictionary, that they used tr rather than chr for such words. Similarly I'd have expected jr not dr in words like drive, where I perceive the sound as /dʒ/.
On the other hand, I perceive the sound at the beginning of twin as an ordinary /t/. For what it's worth, my accent is fairly mild northern England.
Onthis pageanEstuary English speaker who seems to know what he's talking about (studying for a PhD in linguistics) says he has [tʃ] generally before /r/ and sometimes before /w/.
I don't think the sentence should be restored, though - the situation is way too complicated.
I'm the one who made the deletion. If tr is regularly pronounced as [tʃ] by some speakers, I imagine it's dialect dependent. In rapid speech, I might pronounce trick (but not twin) with something approaching a [tʃ]; but then, in rapid enough speech, a lot of phonemic distinctions may disappear. (I speak GA, or something close to it.) In ordinary speech, the r of my 'trick' is rather like a fricative, but only as much as the l of 'play' is. I wouldn't argue from that that English has lateral affricates. kwami19:44, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with JHJ that /tr/ is really /tʃr/, even at a phonemic level, in at least some dialects, but that means it's not allophonic, so there's no real reason to add it :) We could go off and add all the different phonemic cases of /tʃ/ to the list, but it'd get tiresome, so I think it should just be skipped for simplicity.
(OTOH, I find I get something similar to [tʃw] only in fast, careless speech, and normally have [tw] there, or sometimes just [t] if the next sound is strongly rounded).
I personally perceive it as an allophone... but of course that might be just the influence of orthography. I say /tʃrɪk/ and /twɪn/ - I speak GA. I also say /wa.tʃu.want/ for the phrase "what you want" -Iopq23:46, 19 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Couldn't you imagine borrowing a word like chree from Hindi, and wouldn't that be distinct from tree? I also say /wa.tʃu.want/, but for me chree and tree would be perfectly distinct. For one thing, the ch would be partially labialized, but there is no labialization in tree. For another, there is aspiration between the t and the roftree, but there'd be none between the [t] and [ʃ] of chree (the aspiration would come after the [ʃ]). kwami04:18, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Not at all different. (Well, unless I misread the "ch" as being as in "Christian" and said it as "kree".) As far as I can tell, the following R encourages labialisation in my own speech, and the "t" of "tree" is more labialised than that of "cheap". Secondly, they would both behave the same WRT aspiration. I think it's that the /r/ gets devoiced, but I'm not really able to hear it. Also signicantly, my real first name is "Tristan". If I Japanesify that, it's as "chirisutan", not "torisutan". (Incidentally, people from some parts of Melbourne have a habit of applying the pst-alveolarness to the following "S" (but not the T), giving [tʃɹɪʃtən].) —Felix the Cassowary(ɑe hɪː jɐ)05:33, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
For me the rintree is labialized, but the t is not. Yes, the r is devoiced, but it still follows the aspiration - for me at least! kwami20:50, 25 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
FWIW, I have tree[tʃɹi:] and tune[tʃʏ:n] (fronted allophone of /u:/, though that's not strictly relevant here) but twin[twɪn]. My accent is something like RP influenced by Portsmouth (the latter being a curious mix of Westcountry vowels and Cockney consonants).
In the first case, I never have /t/ before /ɹ/ within a morpheme. If they are next to each other across a word/morpheme boundary the /t/ is either unreleased or turned into [ʔ]. I think it would be more fruitful to describe this in phonotactical terms - the phonemes /t/ and /tʃ/ never contrast before /ɹ/, so whether the former is an allophone of the latter before approximants, or if /t/ just is not allowed before /ɹ/ for speakers like me, is moot. A similar argument holds for /d/ vs. /dʒ/ which also do not contrast before /ɹ/ for me within a morpheme.
In the third case, I don't think I've ever heard /tw/ pronounced as [tʃw] by anyone else, let alone by me, so I find it rather hard to believe. Though verifiable citations of others pronouncing it as such are of course welcome.
I'm not a native speaker, but I guess what happens to tr depends on whether your /r/ is retroflex or not. If it's retroflex, I bet the whole tr is retroflex for you – and this gets some affrication very easily (from its aspiration). I wouldn't be surprised if some people actually pronounced it as a true full-grown affricate, as seems to be the case for JHJ. That would most probably still be retroflex, then.
My Chinese textbook uses English tr and dr (among other things!) to explain Pinyinch and zh.
David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 22:53 CEST | 2006/5/7
You know… I've read several times that it's supposed to be palatalized, and its odd behavior in orthography is consistent with that, but I was taught to pronounce it as retroflex instead – without even allophonic palatalization. I've had 4 years of Russian in school, and neither there nor on TV have I ever heard someone palatalize it. Perhaps this is a matter of, say, Moscow vs St. Petersburg…?
David Marjanović (that ends in the palatalized version!) | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 22:42 CEST | 2006/5/7
It's the degree that counts... Compare to a Ukrainian ч and you might notice that it's a lot harder. -Iopq11:02, 28 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Presente is [pɾeˈzẽt͡ʃ] and not [pɾeˈzẽt͡ʃi]. and I've lived in a lot of places. Presente is only pronounced [pɾeˈzẽt͡ʃi] when the word recieves emphasis — Preceding unsigned comment added by 177.31.229.56 (talk) 22:42, 6 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I will cover it now (carioca here, I and all people I know personally obviously delete this vowel), but many times I am too detalist (among my greatest negative traits, have to try hard if I am supposed to sum up my thoughts) and these notes are supposed to be really short. Lguipontes (talk) 11:40, 19 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I don’t undrestand these notations. The COMBINING MINUS SIGN BELOW' (U+0320) is typically used to indicated a retracted consonant; but this article claims that it can be used as a representation of this and d̠ʒ. Is that part of the IPA? I note that it also seems to be the default notation on Phoible. babbage (talk) 15:23, 25 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
PHOIBLE's documentation explains this. In a literal/strictly phonetic/impressionistic IPA transcription, ⟨t⟩ represents alveolar and ⟨t̠⟩ postalveolar, so ⟨t̠ʃ⟩ is more precise in terms of place of articulation, while in most circumstances ⟨tʃ⟩ suffices. Nardog (talk) 08:22, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, thank you. I had only been looking at the Phoible site itself, not the github repo. (Also, your user page is really interesting!) babbage (talk) 00:32, 28 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]