Cuddly little consonants

hernesheir commented on the list cuddly-little-consonants

Would "mind your p's and q's" in academic linguistic long form be rendered mind your voiceless bilabial plosives and voiceless alveolar plosives? Just checking.

June 10, 2010

Telofy commented on the list cuddly-little-consonants

“p” most often is a voiceless bilabial plosive, but “q”, I’m afraid has no such clearly linked sound. In combination with “u” it’s usually pronounced as /kw/ (voiceless velar plosive and voiced labiovelar approximant (but it goes by a few more names)), while the voiceless alveolar plosive is a /t/. Since there are a few more or less common words with “q” not followed by “u” and among them surely many with the “q” being pronounced as /k/, you might be able to argue that not the “qu” cluster has the pronunciation /kw/ commonly associated with it, but that the “q” and the “u” are actually each associated with the respective phonemes. Due to the overwhelming frequency of “qu” words in comparison to “q^u” words, that seems a little counterintuitive to me, but I don’t know on what else one should base such arguments as there are so many so fuzzy and so limited rules to English pronunciation.

June 10, 2010