Speakeasy wrote:As to your memories not being “false”, I would like to accord you the benefit of the doubt. However, as Dragon27 has chosen to characterize my own recollections as being “useless”
Dragon27 wrote:Recalling your entire life experience and saying that you've never noticed people saying certain words in a certain way is completely useless, unless you have been actively aware of this little issue this entire time.
Maybe my choice of words wasn't the most apt one, but I think I've provided enough stipulations for that statement in three of my last posts. But for what it's worth, I personally can't wrap my head around how can you assert with such positivity that you have never heard people pronouncing both of this words in the manner described above (in the wiki article, indistinguishably with the same alveolar flap sound), rather than in the way the dictionary describes (clearly differentiated), throughout your entire life. I wouldn't say an analogous statement for my native language, because I don't have all of my memories of the speech sounds I have ever heard clearly recorded (for accurate analysis) at my disposal at any given moment (and I've had better things to do with my life, than continually trying to notice a certain phonetic phenomenon). I wouldn't even be able to listen and understand real-life speech quickly enough without my unconscious ability to "tune out" small phonetic details, that are not important for grasping the meaning of the spoken message. I can't see how this could be an argument for such a point. Not to mention the fallibility of the ears of a person (even a native), who is not a trained phonetician, to detect and accurately describe these kind of stuff.