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
that the normal English speaker would find it difficult exactly to
reproduce--a "hollow," guttural-like _l_ and a "soft," palatalized
_l_-sound that is only very approximately rendered, in English terms, as
_ly_. Even so simple and, one would imagine, so invariable a sound as
_m_ differs in the two languages. In a Russian word like _most_ "bridge"
the _m_ is not the same as the _m_ of the English word _most_; the lips
are more fully rounded during its articulation, so that it makes a
heavier, more resonant impression on the ear. The vowels, needless to
say, differ completely in English and Russian, hardly any two of them
being quite the same.

I have gone into these illustrati