Discussion Groups / English Usage / February 2010

You can omit "that" from this sentence.

In colloquial AmE, using "yet" in this sense sounds stilted.  "Still"
would work better, especially if moved to the front of the
sentence--"nearby" still sounds like "near my" to my ears.  I don't
think this note applies in BrE but am unsure.

Some years ago I gave some thought as to why Chinese speakers have so
much trouble distinguishing voiced and unvoiced consonants in spoken
English.  Now, I don't know enough about Japanese to know whether the
following applies to you, but I'll say it anyway in case it gives you
any insights.

Consider a pair like d/t.  These two consonants differ in both voicing
and aspiration.  In theory you can get four different consonants from
this "family":
  - unvoiced and unaspirated
  - unvoiced and aspirated
  - voiced and unaspirated
  - voiced and aspirated
In practice, it appears that this is too fine a subdivision to be
useful.  All of the languages I know about use at most two of the four
possibilities.

In English, we distinguish between the voiced version (d) and the
unvoiced version (t).  We don't much care about the aspiration - it
might vary between speakers, and so we don't listen to the aspiration.
This is an approximation, of course, because there are such things as a
voiced "t", but as a first approximation it works.

In Chinese, as I understand it, the important difference lies in the
aspiration, and nobody listens carefully to the voicing.  (I don't know
whether this is also true for Japanese.)  Thus, a native speaker
listening to English will hear distinctions that English speakers don't
notice, while not hearing distinctions that English speakers find
significant.  And similarly, of course, for an English speaker listening
to Chinese.

The above analysis would also apply to the b/p pair.

Your case is slightly different: problems in hearing the difference in
the b/m pair.  That one is trickier.  The consonants in "by" and "my"
are _both_ voiced.  The difference is that the consonant in "by" is also
slightly aspirated, although not as strongly aspirated as in "pie".
It's almost as if we are pushing the sound out in "by", but sucking it
in in "my".

I'm not certain that we English speakers listen to the aspiration when
hearing the difference between "by" and "my".  I think what we're
hearing is the sudden "release" explosion at the end of the "b": a
release that doesn't happen in the case of "m".