Telling the Ts from the Ds

I suspect I've never pronounced the voiced stops /b/, /d/, and /g/ properly. 

Indeed, my ears could hardly distinguish them from their voiceless counterparts /p/, /t/, and /k/ when they are unaspirated - e.g. when they're behind an /s/ in English as in "spot", "stop" and "scar" or in Romance languages like French, Italian and Portuguese. 

Take the t/d set as an example. In English they correspond in fact to three sounds: 

1. Aspirated voiceless "T" as in "top" (example)
2. Unaspirated voiceless "T" as in "stop" (example)
3. Unaspirated voiced "D" as in "dog" (example)

In French, Italian and Portuguese they usually correspond to #2 and #3 - a pair that’s barely distinguishable to my ears. Indeed, many of the videos I found on this topic were made to teach Spanish & Portuguese speakers how (1) in English is meant to be pronounced.

On the other hand, "T" and "D" in Cantonese and Mandarin apparently correspond to #1 and #2 above. Having grown up in a Cantonese-speaking society, perhaps I have been approximating D in English with #2 - or did I not? I cannot tell. 

The reality is as long as I stick to Cantonese, Mandarin and English, I could get away with not distinguishing #2 and #3: aspiration was enough to tell "T" and "D" apart in all three of them regardless of voicedness. Indeed, this distinction would not have come to my mind if I haven't been making forays into Portuguese recently. 

This probably also explains why the voiced consonants, B, D and G, are never used in Hong Kong place names - in the ears of 19th century Europeans, there were probably only different versions of Ps, Ts and Ks. For example, one could argue that Tung Chau Street has an aspirated "T" (i.e. #1), but Tung Chung has an unaspirated one (i.e. #2).  

These are, of course, not the most complex Ts and Ds there could be. Hindi, for example, has eight (!) consonants that all may sound like some forms of Ts and Ds to outsiders.

(I’m sure many of you have noticed this a long time ago, but it still came as a sort of minor epiphany to me this month..)

Mapping Ts and Ds from Cantonese, English, French and Hindi. In the case of Hindi, I set out in each cell first the dental consonant, then the retroflex. In the other three, they're all somewhat alveolar. 

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My first box of masks in 2020

Yesterday, on the eve of a second lockdown in England, I used up my first box of masks this year. 

It is one of the few boxes of EN14683 Type IIR masks I ordered on 26 January, i.e. 2nd Day of  Chinese New Year. Wuhan had just gone into lockdown. Long queues formed outside Hong Kong's pharmacies, often before sunrise, for surgical masks that may or may not come on sale at 10 or 15 times their previous price. Perhaps I'll want to send some to friends & family back in Hong Kong, I thought, so I went to Boots' website and placed an order with them. 

My first box of masks this year

A few hours later I tried to place another order but it got rejected. Boots had run out of surgical masks. 

When the masks arrived I posted them all save a single box of 50 to Hong Kong. Why did I do that? I certainly thought I most probably wouldn't need them, but, well, it wouldn't do any harm to keep a box on the top of my bookshelf anyway - just in case. 

Surgical masks stayed hard to buy for months. We learnt casting our nets beyond the UK with the help of national registries of online pharmacies established under the European Directive 2011/62/EU (thanks), but it seems many people did as well. In the end, I only managed to get 15 more boxes from Germany, which were also airlifted to Hong Kong. 

The situation was better with hand sanitisers. They had gone off the market for a week or two, but they were back by mid-February. In the few happy days when Chinese case number had started to fall, but outbreaks in Korea, Iran and Italy were still in the future, Boots even did a 'Buy 2 Get 1 Free' promotion with their pink, Valentines themed, 100mL bottles of sanitisers. I got a few dozens, kept one for myself, and posted the rest. 

It had turned out to be my only bottle throughout the first lockdown.

By March the flow of masks reversed. I received two boxes of unsolicited masks from my family: one I later found out to be of the anti-dust, anti-pollution variant, and another contained 50 individually-packaged masks. "Overpackaging!", I thought, but they did come handy on my trips five months later. 

In April I also received two homemade fabric from my friends in Cambridge. They have been very useful on short errand trips. 

But this trusty box of Type IIR masks remained my best for a long while. Sturdy, breathable and with a strong aluminium strip that prevents steaming up when properly fitted, I saved them for my longer trips away from home. I cycled with them to Putney, to Windsor and to Cambridge. I used them on my flights to and back from Heidelberg too. 

As England goes into lockdown again, it might be useful to reflect on how far we have come since the first one. Both disposable and fabric masks are now easily obtainable at reasonable prices, and I counted 70% compliance with masking in Stratford Centre the other day. Hand hygiene - and public hygiene in general - have improved. We may not be where we want to be, but we've come a long way. 

And we'll be alright. 

"We'll be alright", handwritten on a lunch delivery bag today. 

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"It's Covid, stupid"

 Controlling Covid rewards politically:-

1. Korea's centre-left Democratic party won the highest number of seats by any party since 1960. 
   
2. Ardern's Labour Party won a landslide in New Zealand. 
   
3. Approval ratings for Taiwan's Tsai Ing-wen have reached her all-time high - after nearly five years in office. 
   
4. Australia's centre-right Coalition has recovered from the last bushfire season and is leading in the national polls again. 
   
5. On the contrary, in the wake of Covid outbreaks in foreign workers' quarters, Singapore's ruling PAP has been returned to office with its worst result since independence. 

The message could not be clearer: it's not so much about left or right, global or local, climate change, immigration, tax, abortion, or China. These are serious topics - but at this moment, in many voters' minds, they rank far, far lower than staying alive and having normal lives. 

And voters know if they are still living normally under the current lot's watch. As a cigar-loving, incumbent-defeating President of the United States could have said, 

"It's Covid, stupid."

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