Noncompositional

Speaking of fricatives in Bei”zh”ing:

I just got through watching today’s episode of Jeopardy!, and an interesting thing happened between the end of Double Jeopardy! and Final Jeopardy! During Double Jeopardy!, Carolyn D’Aquila had given the correct response “Who is Michael Keaton.” Or so it seemed. Before the final round, Alex Trebek announced that upon review, D’Aquila had been found to say “Michael Heaton, as in Patricia Heaton” (that’s [hi:tn]), and so her some money was deducted.

The first thing I thought of was one of my very first assignments in undergraduate phonetics, which involved as-narrow-as-possible transcription of some clips of people speaking English. One of the clips was of someone saying “two candidates,” but the initial sound of “candidates” was [x], the voiceless velar fricative. It was close enough to a [k] sound (plus, once you’ve done word recognition, it’s hard to notice that it’s not a [k]) that it took several listens to catch it. It certainly wasn’t anything like an [h], but you gotta wonder. In fast speech, could a /k/ become an [h]? How about in the particular phonetic context of “Michael _eaton”? Did the Jeopardy! officials hear an [h] or an [x]?

(and yes, I realize the irony of attempting to disambiguate “hard j” and “soft j” by using zh in the context of Mandarin)