Biblical Hebrew Forum

["s.a.breyer" <s.a.breyer AT gmail.com>]

It seems to me that James and Yitzhak are talking about two different
things. 

James is concerned with the acoustic fact, and his account of that is
accurate. A significant piece of my job involves editing audio and video
recordings, correcting misprounounced words, cutting in different words
and the like; my software is nowhere near so informative as that I
presume James works with, but even so there can be no question: a fully
articulated English consonant is tied to the following vocalization.

Yitzhak, however, is concerned with the linguistic fact, and his account
of that is equally accurate. 

The two accounts are to some extent mediated by the physiological fact
that the central consonant cluster of the phrase in question does not
stand by itself: it requires an initial movement of the apex of the
tongue to the alveolar ridge and consequent closure of the vocal stream;
that movement, it seems to me, is "perceived" by the speaker and hearer
as a relization of the consonant which closes the word or "syllable". In
normal speech, in fact, that's all you get even if the consonant closes
an utterance; if you ask someone "Did you do this?" and he answers "I
did." all you're normally going to hear at the end is the closure, not a
fully enunciated and voiced "d". (Significantly, this deletion is less
marked with unvoiced consonants; a voicing probably implies a subsequent
vowel.)

(This is, by the way, not "sloppiness", as people are fond of
suggesting; the full enunciation the schoolmarms propound is an abnormal
articulation. To be sure, stage actors, particularly classical actors,
are trained to speak this way, but that's because the stage actor has to
deal with abnormal acoustic situations in which making the linguistic
substratum intelligible takes precedence over making the speech stream
sound "natural".)

The *interesting* question is how people parse the acoustic fact into
the linguistic fact - which is what I'd really like to see James write
about instead of all this who-shot-John about an entity which is of
little use outside prosodic analysis.

Stoney Breyer
Writer/Touchwood Creative