allophones - Pronunciation of "-st-". When is it "sd" and when "st"?


I recently found some words but I got confused and don't know whether to say sd or st. I am sure the following are pronounced as st:



  • sister

  • caster

  • ancestor

  • master


But the following are pronounced as sd:



  • mysterious

  • destiny

  • stable

  • staple


Is there a rule for changing the pronunciation of t to d following an s?



Answer



I think what you're hearing is not the difference between [st] and [sd], but whether the 't' is aspirated [stʰ] or not [st]. In Chinese, these are two different phonemes, and Pinyin represents [tʰ] by 't' and [t] by 'd'. These sounds are two different varieties (allophones) of /t/ in English; the difference between /d/ and /t/ is whether it is vocalized or not.


The rule in English (judging from your examples) is that if the syllable starts with 'st', the 't' is not aspirated; if the syllable starts with 't' and the previous one ends with 's', then the 't' is aspirated. Where you break the 'st' between syllables depends on a lot of factors, including which syllable is stressed. If the 'st' occurs at the start of a stressed syllable, it won't be aspirated (unless there's a morpheme boundary, as in mistook).


I would also suspect that it depends on the speaker in some words (I would guess destiny is one of these).


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