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pronunciation - Why are 'student' and 'suspend' not pronounced as written?


I am a Chinese student beginning to learn English. I am curious to know why the word student is pronounced with the sound of d instead of t. Likewise, why is the sound of b used instead of p when people say suspend?



Answer



The 't' in student is not pronounced like a 'd'. You just think it is because there is a mismatch between the consonants in the Chinese language and the consonants in English.


Pinyin uses the letter 'd' for an unaspirated voiceless alveolar stop (represented /t/ in IPA), and the letter 't' for an aspirated voiceless alveolar stop (represented /tʰ/ in IPA). English uses the letter 'd' for an unaspirated voiced alveolar stop (represented /d/ in IPA), and the letter 't' for a voiceless alveolar stop, which is either aspirated (/tʰ/) or unaspirated (/t/) depending on its position in the word. Since there are no voiced stops in Chinese, you're not used to distinguishing between stops depending on whether they are voiced and unvoiced, so you don't hear the difference between a /t/ and a /d/, while /tʰ/ sounds different from both of them.


In words beginning 'st', 'sp', and 'sk', I believe all dialects of English use the unaspirated unvoiced stops ('sd', 'sb', and 'sg' in Pinyin), and in words beginning 't', 'p', 'k', they use the aspirated unvoiced stops ('t', 'p', and 'k' in Pinyin). Thus, at the beginning of words, the consonants 't', 'p', 'k' are distinguished from 'd', 'b', 'g' both by being aspirated and by being unvoiced. In the middle of words, things are more complicated; here, the consonants 'd', 'b', 'g' are distinguished from 't', 'p', and 'k' by being voiced.


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