Oh those booths

[E Wayles Browne]

As an American speaker (from New England), I say the singular unvoiced: /bu:θ/ and then I optionally have voicing in the plural: /bu:θs/ or /bu:ðz/. That's phonemic representation. A detail of the phonetics of English /z/ (like English voiced obstruents in general) is that they are not always voiced all the way from beginning to end; word-initial /z/ starts out unvoiced and then becomes voiced, so it's [sz...] whereas word-final /z/ starts out voiced and becomes unvoiced towards the end, so it's [...zs]. When I listen to the on-line dictionary saying the plural, I hear [bu:ðzs], so the z is indeed first voiced, and then unvoiced towards the end--and I would say it in this way too.
Thank you for mentioning the site site www.howjsay.com, by the way! I didn't know about it before.

--
Wayles Browne, Assoc. Prof. of Linguistics
Department of Linguistics
Morrill Hall 220, Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853, U.S.A.

tel. 607-255-0712 (o), 607-273-3009 (h)
fax 607-255-2044 (write FOR W. BROWNE)
e-mail ewb2 at cornell.edu

________________________________________
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu] on behalf of Goloviznin Konstantin [kottcoos at GMAIL.COM]
Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2012 8:03 AM
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Subject: [SEELANGS] Oh those booths

Hello all,

There is some doubt about pronunciation of the word booths.
Dictionaries  give two variants for singular of it . Those are
[buːð] and [buːθ]. Сorrespondingly the plural for them should be
[buːðz] and [buːθs]. But listening to it on the site www.howjsay.com
gives [buːðs]. Am I right about my hearing and this time it's  only
some exception to the rule "after voiced - voiced, after unvoiced -
unvoiced" or something else?

Thanks in advance,
Konstantin

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