你还认为美音中water里的t是发成d，并美其名曰“清音浊化”的吗？Well, think again! 下文以英文写成，这是我在头条的一次尝试。请勤奋的小伙伴们把它当成练习阅读和写作的好机会，在下期文章里我会给出中文版本。要想把英语学好，就需要“听说读写”齐头并进，不能有短板的哟~
水桶的容量由最短的那根木条决定
Do Americans substitute "t" sound with "d" when they say “What about you?”
Well, the answer is No. For consonants, there are voiced consonants, such as b in book. "Voiced" means that when you pronounce the sound, if you put your hand on your throat, you can feel the vibration of your vocal cord. On the other hand, there are voiceless consonants such as p in paper. "Voiceless " means that you won feel the vibration when you do the same thing. Moreover, a lot of consonants come in pairs: p and b, t and d, k and g, th as in thank and th as in they, s as in sure and s as in usual, ch as in chicken and g as in George and so on.
In American accent, if a voiceless consonant is in the middle (of a sentence or a word) such as “what about you or water”, it becomes "not aspirated" meaning it loses the puff (the air that comes out), so the t here sounds more like a Spanish t or a Hindi t, which means if you put your palm in front of your mouth, you don’t feel the strong air coming out as you would when words like “tea” is pronounced. A lot of Americans even omit the t sound when it is followed by ‘n’ sound, such as “mountain”, which is called t - glottalization if you’d like a fancy schmancy word. In certain areas of England, t is also omitted in words like “better”.
Misconception
However, the misconception that “d” is used to replace “t” is fairly ubiquitous. I was watching a show on Netflix where the close caption was turned on, and I noticed when the hero said "what you got?" (This is an extremely lazy way of saying things, an abbreviation of “what have you got?" actually), the subtitle read "what do you got", which is VERY bad grammar. It might sound like it, but it is NOT it.
I believe a lot of things are not what they seem to be, so tend to ask questions myself and try to answer my own questions too. During the process, firstly my problem solving skills are improved, secondly I learn things more quickly and remember them more firmly through association and comparison. In this case, I used to think it was the "d" sound myself, but I just couldn totally persuade myself in taking that for granted, so dug around for quite a while, and got my own "ah-ha" moment.
Furthermore, there are actually many other good examples of this "no aspirated" change, for example, k in skid, t in stop, p in sport, tr in strudel etc. please try it yourself. The bottom line is, all this is for one purpose: convenience. When you try to pronounce t in stop as a regular t sound, there will be too many puffs (for s, you are already letting out air), the same with what I call the "lazy American t" in water. In my language journey I have noticed that this "convenience" phenomenon exists in virtually all the languages I learned. In Chinese for example, when two third tones (called circumflex in linguistics by the way) are together, the first one will turn into the second, in the greeting "ni hao " that you are all familiar with, ni was originally the third tone, but is changed to be the second so it is more convenient to pronounce.
In Japanese, there are way too many examples: 学（がく） ＋ 校（こう）→ 学校（がっこう）as you can see that くis gone and changed to a sokuon, a glottal stop (linguistics terms). So is Korean as these two languages share so many similarities: becomes and to , is changed to because of the in the front. Not to mention Irish where you have lenition and ellipses, and vowel harmonisation in Turkish and so on.
To summarize, a lot of things can be explained by the theory: we are lazy. We are too lazy to run long distances, so cars are invented (we are lazy to the extent that I would circle around the gym parking lot hoping to find a spot closer to the entrance, although on the treadmill I would run 10. Ironic, isn it?). Our brain is very lazy, so if it finds its comfort zone it likes to veg out there, hence our accent when we learn a language - the brain finds a similar sound in our native language and goes:"that will do" and sends an order to the mouth with the wrong pronunciation.
That was the "economics" side of me talking. Economics is always about finding the most efficient way of doing things (with limited resources, you either maximise your outcome or minimise your cost). Ok, that is my statement for today. Hey, at least youve got some reading material.
敬请等待明日的中文版。
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