"Voiced obstruent" mistakes

[James Crippen]

On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 15:47, D Roy Mitchel IV <droymitchell at yahoo.com> wrote:
> What I would share is that I've encountered many students of Tlingit and
> Dena'ina over the years who pronounce the orthographys' d as a voiced stop,
> not only because it's spelled like the English voiced stop, but many
> guidebooks for learners state explicitly that these sounds are "the same" in
> English as they are in Tlingit and in Dena'ina as they are in English.
> This is one of my pet peeves.  Admittedly, it doesn't lead the learners
> mistakenly to create a different word, and English-speaking learners of
> Athabascan and Tlingit will have pronunciation difficulties, but I cannot
> agree with steering them in the wrong direction by design.

This is an issue that has concerned me as well, but it's something
I've kind of written off as inevitable. Interestingly, since General
American English tends to have fully devoiced initial stops (and
perhaps affricates), in initial position the orthography leads English
speakers to produce something rather like the actual sound. This
doesn't work in other positions, however, and of course English
speakers will allow voice to spread across word boundaries and thus
spoil the effect.

> When I talk to learners about the consonant system of Tlingit, for example,
> I identify seven consonants that may be pronounced consistently the same in
> English and in Tlingit, three in which certain English allophones may match
> with Tlingit phones, and 32 in which English has no exact match at all.

That's a good point. It's misleading to assume that e.g. <j> really
represents the same sound in both Tlingit and English. Unfortunately
most teachers aren't linguists and thus don't try very hard to be
precise about these things.

But what I was really looking for was an example or two where
linguists - people who ought to be more careful - have gratuitously
assumed that the orthography and/or transcription represented voiced
sounds and thus they came to incorrect conclusions about phonological
rules or the like.

James