Wolfe's brilliance or my denseness?

Lee Berman · 24 May 2011, 20:02 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Tue, 24 May 2011 16:02:27 -0400
Subject: (urth) Wolfe's brilliance or my denseness?
Message-ID: <SNT123-W48B832F2C89D615C339660CF750 at phx.gbl>

>Jerry Friedman: I'll bet you have no trouble saying "smoke" or "Cass does" with an /s/.
>My intuition for "Casdoe" is a /z/, though, like yours.  I doubt it matters.

I have no trouble saying "smoke" because the "s" is not in the middle of the word. I can
say "Cass does" easily IF I say it as two separate words. If I say it quickly, as one
word, the difficulty returns.

I'm not saying the difficulty is inherent in human tongue function but rather a function of
my AmE trained tongue and the linguistic rules it has learned over a lifetime. It only matters 
as the point of a hypothesis for why non-native speakers of English are more likely to have caught
that Cas was Dorcas.

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