one that the number of clearly distinguishable sounds and nuances of
sounds that are habitually employed by the speakers of a language is far
greater than they themselves recognize. Probably not one English speaker
out of a hundred has the remotest idea that the _t_ of a word like
_sting_ is not at all the same sound as the _t_ of _teem_, the latter
_t_ having a fullness of "breath release" that is inhibited in the
former case by the preceding _s_; that the _ea_ of _meat_ is of
perceptibly shorter duration than the _ea_ of _mead_; or that the final
_s_ of a word like _heads_ is not the full, buzzing _z_ sound of the _s_
in such a word as _please_. It is the frequent failure of foreigners,
who have acquired a practical mastery of English and who have eliminated
all the cruder phonetic shortcomings of their less careful brethren, to
observe such minor distinctions that helps to give their English
pronunciation the curiously elusive "accent" that we all vaguely feel.
We do not diagnose the "accent" as the total acoustic effect produced by
a series of slight but specific phonetic errors for the very good reason
that we have never made clear to ourselves our own phonetic stock in
trade. If two languages taken at random, say English and Russian, are
compared as to their phonetic systems, we are more apt than not to find
that very few of the phonetic elements of the one find an exact analogue
in the other. Thus, the _t_ of a Russian word like _tam_ "there" is
neither the English _t_ of _sting_ nor the English _t_ of _teem_. It
differs from both in its "dental" articulation, in other words, in being
produced by contact of the tip of the tongue with the upper teeth, not,
as in English, by contact of the tongue back of the tip with the gum
ridge above the teeth; moreover, it differs from the _t_ of _teem_ also
in the absence of a marked "breath release" before the following vowel
is attached, so that its acoustic effect is of a more precise,
"metallic" nature than in English. Again, the English _l_ is unknown in
Russian, which possesses, on the other hand, two distinct _l_-sounds