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I don't have any reason not to believe you, but your position does not seem to be backed up by Wikipedia, where /d/ is not listed as a phoneme. https://en.wiki

I don't have any reason not to believe you, but your position does not seem to be backed up by Wikipedia, where /d/ is not listed as a phoneme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Taiwanese_Hokkien https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Taiwanese_Hokkien I have a hypothesis, mostly dependent on the position of a native English speaker, which I have no idea whether you are or not: It's common to not be able to easily distinguish /e/ and /ai/. English does not have the former, and it tends to best match to the /ai/ diphthong, which glides over and would "average" to /e/. It's also common to confuse aspiration and voicing on stops. English initial voiced stops are unaspirated, while initial unvoiced stops are aspirated. Hence, an unvoiced, unaspirated initial stop does not typically occur in English, and can vary in listener interpretation between /t/ or /d/. This article covers voice onset time (VOT) and how voicing and aspiration play into it: http://www.linguisticsnetwork.com/tutorials-aspiration-and-voice-onset-time/ http://www.linguisticsnetwork.com/tutorials-aspiration-and-v... Important note is that VOT is negative for voiced, near zero for unvoiced, and positive for aspirated. This measurable phenomenon backs up the fact that unvoiced, unaspirated sounds are basically in between standard English sounds and why you can get differing interpretations.

HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
Yeap you probably hit the nail on the head. I'm a native English speaker and I only know a tiny bit of Hokkien. I really struggle with the aspirated/non-aspirated aspect of many of the consonants. Not sure about the vowel sounds, I found those all reasonably trivial to distinguish. https://mkdict.net/results?query=te%CC%82&page=1&q_type=tw&roman=t&t_dict=moe https://mkdict.net/results?query=te%CC%82&page=1&q_type=tw&r... If you click on the "+" button, there's a voice recording of how to pronounce it. It's from the Taiwanese Ministry of Education. To me it sounds much more like "day" than "tea".
- jdmichal 9y ago
  The vowel sound definitely matches /e/. It sounds like /ai/, but there's none of the glide that would be present in a diphthong. I ran it by my wife, as she's a native Spanish and English speaker, and she agrees with /e/ over /ai/. Thanks for that link. Very cool site; reminds me of dict.leo.org for German.
  - HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
    The vowel sound in day is /ai/? I can hear a slight difference between the vowel sounds in both tê and day. That's something I always just attributed to accent, not a different vowel - but I suppose vowel changes can be very subtle.
    - jdmichal 9y ago
      Er... No, I brain farted. The diphthong in "day" is /eɪ/. /aɪ/ (which I was listing as /ai/ on my phone) is as the word "tie". So maybe that makes it more obvious why it would be easy to confuse /e/ and /eɪ/, especially when your native language only has the latter. Brain heuristics work regardless of whether you want them to or not, and they'll fill in the missing /ɪ/ even if it's not present.

HumanDrivenDev 9y ago

Yeap you probably hit the nail on the head. I'm a native English speaker and I only know a tiny bit of Hokkien. I really struggle with the aspirated/non-aspirated aspect of many of the consonants. Not sure about the vowel sounds, I found those all reasonably trivial to distinguish. https://mkdict.net/results?query=te%CC%82&page=1&q_type=tw&roman=t&t_dict=moe https://mkdict.net/results?query=te%CC%82&page=1&q_type=tw&r... If you click on the "+" button, there's a voice recording of how to pronounce it. It's from the Taiwanese Ministry of Education. To me it sounds much more like "day" than "tea".

jdmichal 9y ago
The vowel sound definitely matches /e/. It sounds like /ai/, but there's none of the glide that would be present in a diphthong. I ran it by my wife, as she's a native Spanish and English speaker, and she agrees with /e/ over /ai/. Thanks for that link. Very cool site; reminds me of dict.leo.org for German.
- HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
  The vowel sound in day is /ai/? I can hear a slight difference between the vowel sounds in both tê and day. That's something I always just attributed to accent, not a different vowel - but I suppose vowel changes can be very subtle.
  - jdmichal 9y ago
    Er... No, I brain farted. The diphthong in "day" is /eɪ/. /aɪ/ (which I was listing as /ai/ on my phone) is as the word "tie". So maybe that makes it more obvious why it would be easy to confuse /e/ and /eɪ/, especially when your native language only has the latter. Brain heuristics work regardless of whether you want them to or not, and they'll fill in the missing /ɪ/ even if it's not present.