Oh those booths

[Charles Mills]

That's a nice detail, but not surprising for the student of Russian.  In a
nice paper on voicing assimilation and /v/, Bruce Hayes showed the most
remarkably thing: that word-final sonorants in Russian (/m n l r j v/)
could be viewed as PHONOLOGICALLY voiceless, but PHONETICALLY voiced.  The
example he gave was жизнь, which can be pronounced жизнь or жиснь, or
even жиснь with a voiceless [n].  The explanation he gave was that
different classes of sounds (obstruent, sonorant, etc.) each had their own
voicing threshold, and that -- because of the level of sub glottal pressure
-- sonorants voiced spontaneously, even though on the grammatical level
they could be viewed as [-voice].  It was a brilliant solution to an
otherwise recalcitrant problem (the variety of pronunciations), which seems
to extend to the English example [buːðs], only in reverse: Maybe [buːðs] is
/buðz/ on the phonological level, but the speaker has reached the end of
the word and it's time for the voice to be switched off.  But it's a nice
observation.  If someone told me I was saying [buːðs], I would swear I was
saying [buːðz].  They both sound acceptable to me.

Charles
DLI



On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 5:03 AM, Goloviznin Konstantin
<kottcoos at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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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