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16:34
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A: Is the T in ‘mistook’ pronounced the same as the T in ‘mistake’ is?

alphabetIt is indeed, quite often, "misdook." Basically. I took the liberty of downloading (American English) pronunciations of "mistook" from six online dictionaries, then removing everything up until the initial period of silence, i.e. the "mis." These pronunciations are from Collins, Merriam-Webster, ...

tchrist
tchrist
Nonsense, nonsense, and more nonsense.
alphabet
alphabet
@tchrist I've added a response to your comment. While the first few results on YouGlish indeed use the "took" pronunciation, many of the later ones pronounce it "dook"; from the ones I listened to, the ratio is about 2:1. I use the "dook" pronunciation (i.e. I don't aspirate the /t/ in that word, making it sound like a /d/ if you listen to it in isolation).
Robusto
Robusto
I clearly hear the /t/ in most of those reductions of yours. In the one I don't hear you could easily have lopped off too much of the beginning of the phoneme in question.
alphabet
alphabet
@Robusto I address that in the last section of my answer.
Robusto
Robusto
@alphabet I read that but I disagree with your characterizations.
alphabet
alphabet
16:34
@Robusto To make the point about hearing a short "t" sound a bit clearer, I've put an edit at the end of my answer showing that you can also hear that sound in some pronunciations of the word duck, which we would obviously transcribe with a /d/.
Todd Wilcox
Todd Wilcox
"dook" (with an unaspirated [t]) - I think you've made a mistake. An unaspirated /t/ and a /d/ are not necessarily the same thing. /d/ is a voiced /t/, not an unaspirated /t/. An unaspirated /t/ is still a flavor of /t/. Another thing that I find strange about your answer is the first link of the processed audio that you put in the answer plays what sounds to me like "took" five times, but it seems like you hear it as "dook" at least some of the times? Perhaps there's a factor of your speakers or headphones or something that is affecting your formulation of this answer.
Regarding your link in the edit, I can't hear anything of what you're asserting. The audio is so noisy and full of artifacts that it's sonically worthless to my ears. Also the second sound has far less high frequency content, as if it's been filtered, which suggests it's not a valid comparison. Besides all of that, what I do hear under all the mess sounds voiced to me in both cases.
alphabet
alphabet
@ToddWilcox To be clear: the phone [d] is a voiced [t]. But the phoneme /d/ is partially or entirely devoiced in certain environments.
(And trying on a few different devices, I absolutely hear the first four of those as "dook," not "took." I'm not sure why anyone would hear them differently.)
ItWasLikeThatWhenIGotHere
ItWasLikeThatWhenIGotHere
@alphabet - that's pretty much what I meant, but I'd lose the word "sometimes" - that suggests it happens less frequently than it does, and I'm having trouble thinking of any circumstances where the stop is not an intrinsic part of the syllable.
@minseong - it's correct in what it says, but just like the video it works by removing context and providing a cue to lead people towards or away from possible different contexts (both set the listener up with "here's what you're going to hear"). But this kind of mistirection is outside my juristiction and beyond my wistom.
Weather Vane
Weather Vane
@minseong but elsewhere, alphabet says the 's' belongs with the second syllable. It's quite difficult to say 'sdook' and have the 'd' sound like a 'd'. On the contrary, it sounds like a 't'.
alphabet
alphabet
@WeatherVane That's exactly my point: if you say "mistook" with a [d] sound, it will still sound like you're saying the word "mistook," since English doesn't contrast voiced [d] and unaspirated [t] in that position. As I explain, it makes the most sense to see either option, a [d] or an unaspirated [t], as a realization of the phoneme /d/.
Peter Shor
Peter Shor
16:34
Because English speakers do not contrast /t/ and /d/ after an /s/, you can pronounce mistake as either /misteɪk/ or /misdeɪk/ and be understood perfectly well. And I suspect native English speakers use both pronunciations. So the dictionaries aren't exactly wrong.
leftaroundabout
leftaroundabout
I would add that it can readily be explained why many speakers pronounce "stoo" rather like "sdoo": the latter, i.e. /sdʊ/ allows leaving the lips in a rounded shape the whole time, whereas /stʊ/ requires rapidly going back and forth between round and stretched lips to make the t stand out clearly. Absent a real necessity (which there isn't, because of the lack of distinction between "sd" and "st") this kind of movement is routinely optimised away by daily speech laziness. It has nothing to do with aspiration, at any rate.
Greg Burghardt
Greg Burghardt
To be honest, I've never heard it pronounced it misdook.
qrsngky
qrsngky
Some people identify unaspirated [t] with /d/, while some others identify it with /t/. Some English dialects pronounce "d" as devoiced [t] in the initial position (I think I found some in the US), but for some others, maybe not. For me, I (not a native English speaker) distinguish /tʰ/ /t/ and /d/, so using [d] like "misdook" in English sounds a bit odd.

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