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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