More on dental fricatives

[David L. White]

> Given our recent discussion of dental fricatives in English,
> I'm hoping it will be interesting to mention a curious fact
> about dental fricatives in Basque.

        This is not meant to be an objection to anything Dr. Trask has said,
but it is fairly well-known in cases of what might be called routine full
bilingualism for phonemic distinctions of one language to be imported into
another.   Good examples fail me at this late hour (still recovering as I am
from the shock of seeing Florida called and then uncalled for Gore), but I
think a few can be found in Thomason and Kaufman.  So perhaps the difference
in treatment (if I have understood the facts correctly) has to do with the
extent to which Basque speakers were fully fluent in Spanish at different
times.  Perhaps it could even be a good indirect indicator of this.
        (The bad example I can think of involves Japanese speakers, who as a
group are apparently quite well trained in English from a young-enough age,
importing English phonemic distinctions into Japanese, and is accordingly a
bit unnatural.  But the phenomenon is real enough.)

                                                        Dr. David L. White