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I checked that their pronunciations are /ster/ and /der/ But I can't hear the difference between them! Can anyone tell me the difference and how to pronounce them separately?

FindingNemo
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    There won’t necessarily be any difference. Initial /d/ is usually at least partially voiced, but it can also be unvoiced, in which case it is exactly the same as the unaspirated [t] in stair. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Mar 02 '15 at 17:10
  • Would people be able to hear the difference? Or can they feel the difference when they pronounce? Thank you! – FindingNemo Mar 02 '15 at 17:14
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    If we assume that dare is being said in such a way that the /d/ is not voiced, then people will think they’re able to hear the difference because they know that stare has a /t/ and dare has a /d/—and the third player, tare has an initial /t/, which is forcefully aspirated and slightly affricated, thus very different from the other two. However, if you record stare and dare and use a computer to cut away the [s] bit of stare, then people will almost always be completely unable to tell the difference. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Mar 02 '15 at 17:17
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    Some people would hear the difference right away, and others wouldn't know they were hearing anything different. In English /t/ and /d/ neutralize in many environments in speech, and after initial /s/ is one of them. We deal with this by spelling and transcribing this as /st/, but in fact the allophone of /t/ used there is virtually indistinguishable from the allophone of /d/ that would appear in initial /sd/, just as the allophone of /t/ that shows up in many speakers bottle is in fact a glottal stop. Phonemes are generalizations; individual phonation is individual. – John Lawler Mar 02 '15 at 17:29
  • Perhaps you should also say where you are. This T may be pronounced differently in London than in Chicago. – GEdgar Mar 02 '15 at 18:01
  • I find it incredible that one could not hear the difference between "stair" and "dare" when properly pronounced. ("Properly pronounced" meaning spoken by a US Midwesterner.) As I've mentioned before, I suspect such differences are as much an issue of discrimination by the listener as they are diction by the speaker. If you're raised in a culture that does not differentiate then you don't hear the difference. – Hot Licks Mar 02 '15 at 19:41
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    @Hot Licks: the OP is not asking about the difference between "stair" and "dare" (there's an /s/ in one that's missing from the other); he's asking about the difference between the /t/ and the /d/ in those words. Namely, the difference between "it's stark" and "it's dark", which are much harder to tell apart. – Peter Shor Mar 02 '15 at 21:03
  • @PeterShor - OK, I'll admit that those are pretty hard to tell apart. – Hot Licks Mar 02 '15 at 21:14
  • You have a very good ear! – Araucaria - Him Mar 02 '15 at 23:14
  • Are there any native English words beginning with the phonemes /sd-/? I wonder if there's a phonotactic rule which prohibits it? – curiousdannii Mar 03 '15 at 08:11
  • According to the Wikipedia page on English phonotactics there is in fact a rule which prevents it: "The second consonant in a complex onset must not be a voiced obstruent" – curiousdannii Mar 03 '15 at 08:16
  • stair and dare has the same phonemes except the s, as: tear (rip) and dare. So basically, it's the difference between t and d. – Lambie Dec 26 '23 at 20:45
  • Related. – tchrist Mar 14 '24 at 15:00

2 Answers2

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The initial consonants in ‘tear’ (the verb) and ‘dare’ are distinguished mainly by the fact that initial /t/ is unvoiced and slightly aspirated while initial /d/ is slightly voiced and not aspirated. The /t/ in ‘stair’ is not aspirated, so it is distinguished from /d/ only with regard to voicing. The voicing of /d/ is however so slight that there is virtually no audible difference between the two sounds.

fdb
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  • English doesn't phonemically distinguish aspirated and unaspirated sounds, but it can often be more obvious than voicing, which results in tricky examples like this where the [t] and [d] are so very similar. – curiousdannii Mar 03 '15 at 08:08
  • @curiousdannii Maybe not phonemically, but more air comes out with tear than with dare. – Lambie Dec 26 '23 at 20:46
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The two sounds are very similar, but /t/ is the unvoiced equivalent of /d/. Many languages have both sounds. Listen for the voiced component as you would when dealing with /b/ vs. /p/, /g/ vs. /k/, and other such consonant sounds.

Paul Rowe
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  • Would people be able to hear the difference? Or can they feel the difference when they pronounce the word themselves? Thank you! – FindingNemo Mar 02 '15 at 17:14
  • Try practicing with a friend who speaks English natively on words where the only difference is that consonant: dare/tear, dale/tale, dart/tart, dell/tell, dent/tent, dip/tip, dowel/towel, drain/train, dune/tune. Can you hear the difference when your friend says these words? Can you feel the difference when you pronounce these words correctly? – Paul Rowe Mar 02 '15 at 17:24
  • I was considering fdb's answer and realized that, as in other languages, the difference is often distinguished by context. Of the word pairs I provided above, you likely wouldn't be able to replace one with the other in a sentence and have it make sense. Don't worry: English isn't the only language that does this. – Paul Rowe Mar 02 '15 at 17:27
  • You can hear the difference because hearing is conditioned by context. If you recorded it and chopped off the initial /s/ or looked at a spectrogram, there might not be a difference. People don't normally feel a sound when they're pronouncing; whether they can detect a difference in their own speech and explain what it is would probably depend on their training, but based on studying linguistics, naive intuitions about sounds are often incorrect. – Stuart F Dec 26 '23 at 21:06