Hi everyone and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation

podcast.

My name is Mandy and this is our 61st episode.

Oh, it feels good to be finished with version 1 of rhythm and intonation. It feels nice that everything is slowly getting back to normal around Seattle Learning Academy.

I'm really excited about today's show about the T sound being replaced by a D sound by native speakers in the United States.

I've been waiting and waiting to talk about the strange things the T-Sound does,

but it was pretty far down the list of episodes that I thought were important.

I'm deciding to do it now because there have been two recent forum posts about this topic,

and both topics were started by Brazilians. However, this issue is important for a lot of languages, not just Portuguese.

This issue was first brought to my attention when I was teaching a corporate class earlier this year,

and two Spanish speakers came up to me on a break and asked why they were both hearing an R sound

in the middle of the word water. An R sound? I asked. Yes, they answered. In the middle of the word,

yes, they answered. This seemed very strange to me, so I asked them what their

native language was, and they both said it was Spanish. I asked them to say the word,

which they both pronounced water. I asked them if they hear an R sound when they say the word,

and they both said no.

Then I pronounced the word water, two different acceptable ways, and asked them which way

they hear an R sound. I had my answer as to why they were hearing an R sound in the middle

of the word water, and it all has to do with what linguists

call an a veiler tap, and what I call a quick D sound. If you've been listening to these

podcasts for a while and have heard the podcast about the R sound, I warned you all of tapping your R's.

That tapped R sound is the same sound Americans make when we substitute a quick D sound for the T

...