Non native speaker?

[Beverly Flanigan]

Chief Moose also has /v/ for voiced (th) medially, not just finally--as in
'other' and 'brother'.   But haven't we diverged from the question about
the sniper?  Is the entire threatening letter available somewhere?  I
thought not, but if it is, it's quite easy to detect non-native English, in
both oral and written productions.  This is indeed something forensic
linguists should be able to do.  At least those of us in SLA can usually do
this, and there are plenty such experts in the DC area.

At 01:22 PM 10/23/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>I've heard this phonology from other educated, middle or upper middle class
>African Americans from Eastern Virginia.  One of them was an IBM sales rep
>serving the Ball State account several years ago whose English was clearly
>Tidewater but had D initially and f/v finally.  Could it be a Tidewater
>variant?
>
>Herb Stahlke
>
> > >
> > >While I'm asking questions, Chief Moose (who is, incidentally, Dr. Moose)
> > >replaces all of his "th" sounds with either a hard "D" (initial) or "F".
> > >I have heard this from time to time, though usually not so pronounced,
> > >including a classmate in 1950s rural Pennsylvania with a 100 percent
> > >white school population. I had always assumed it was a minor speech
> > >impediment (is there a new PC word for this?) or an ideomorph. Are there
> > >dialects that include this shift?
> > >
> > [d] and [t] for /dh/ and /th/ are standard non-standard dialectal
> > variants in certain northeast urban areas (NYC--where it's a
> > shibboleth for "Brooklynese":  dese, dem, dose, Boston, etc.), New
> > Orleans, U.P. of Michigan, and other areas with foreign substratum.
> > I haven't been paying attention to Chief Moose's fricatives, so I'm
> > not either agreeing or disagreeing with your assessment on that.  (I
> > know he was formerly police chief in Portland, OR, but I don't know
> > where he was from before that.)
> >
> > Larry
> >