Dueling impressions

[Stahlke, Herbert F.W.]

On Sep 8, 2004, at 8:01 AM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> I was once chatting with a Kentucky-born, white linguist about
> dialects. In the course of the conversation, he asked me about the
> implosive consonants of BE. I was caught off guard. I asked,
"Implosive
> consonants of Black English? What implosive consonants?" He replied,
> "You know. As in 'boy' and so forth." When I heard his example, I was
> totally flabbergasted. The type of pronunciation that he considered to
> be a defining characteristic of BE is one that I've always considered
> to be a defining characteristic of the speech of "country"
> White-English speakers!

me too.  in " 'Bama" 'Alabama' with an implosive b, most
stereotypically.  (i think that b is by far the most affected consonant
-- possibly the only affected one, for many speakers.)  but then i'm
not a scholar of southern states phonetics.

They show up also with d and g.  Ladefoged notes them also in his Course
in Phonetics, where he says that they turn up in emphatic speech.  He's
referring to Carl Sagan's pronunciation of "billions and billions".

Herb