For words ending in "-ity" is it ~t or ~d

[James Harbeck]

Tom, just so you know, on the matter of whether the sound in the
average North American pronunciation of "matter" or "body" or similar
words is [d] or a flap or tap, the level of agreement among
phoneticians that it's a flap or tap is about on the level of the
agreement among geologists that plate tectonics works. It may be that
_you_ fully pronounce a [d] on those words, but extensive data show
that most North American people in relaxed speech produce a flap or
tap (usually a tap, but in words like "murder" a flap is common), and
a flap or tap is common for many of these words even in the most
formal speech. It's why the British pronunciation of "very" is
sometimes represented for Americans as "veddy" -- because Americans
would pronounce "veddy", or "Betty" or "heady" or "sweaty", with the
same sound many British speakers will use for the r in "very".

Certainly the place of articulation is the same and the manner is
similar, but the [d] in "do" and "don't" is, for most NA speakers,
more strongly articulated than the tap they say in "madder" and
"matter". That tap is not an English _phoneme_, it's an English
_allophone_, and a very common one. The phoneme is /d/ or /t/, but
the allophone is in these cases the tap (or, in some instances, the
flap). It would, on the other hand, be wrong to render the citation
form of "matter" with a /d/ phoneme, because while nearly everyone in
NA says it with a tap normally, it's understood and agreed that in
full citation-form pronunciation that consonant would be a [t] and
not a [d] -- and "matter" carefully pronounced with a full-value [d]
would be heard as "madder," even if preceded by "what's the".

You're free to disagree with what's written in textbooks, taught in
classes and published in papers, of course, but I just wanted to make
sure you knew you weren't actually arguing with just the impressions
of one or two individuals on this list. You might find some of the
available literature on the subject of interest, and admitting of
more detailed material to engage with. Categorical perception can
make prima facie acoustical impressions unreliable -- most English
speakers have to be trained to be aware of aspiration, for instance,
but it's very real. As to your proprioceptive impression, again, you
may well fully pronounce a [d] in those words, but I and, I suspect,
many others on this list are quite certain that we produce a tap or
flap in many of those positions as a matter (not madder) of course.

James Harbeck.

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