I also have a hell of a time pronouncing the glottal plosive/stop sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, my native dialect of English is absolutely riddled with glottal stops, but you know Iran? The actual native pronunciation starts with a consonant. The glottal plosive. I cannot do this no matter how hard I try. (See also: uvular plosives)
I really don’t get how a thought like that would occur to you. Do you think English is somehow a better language than others? In any case, it’s already been pointed out a ton of times that this is just completely wrong, and I’m assuming you’ve never tried to learn another language or you’d know. Indeed, that’s a good way of thinking about this - if English did in fact encompass all sounds of all languages, then English speakers would not have a lot of trouble pronouncing words in other languages correctly, and learning pronunciation in other languages would be a breeze. In fact, it’s just a fucking nightmare, and most people fail to ever get it right. To be sure, I am not saying this is true more for native speakers of English than it is for native speakers of other languages. But it would not surprise me if it was, to be honest.
I was reading a work by a linguist and he mentioned a language (sorry can’t remember which one) which had what its speakers regarded as three separate and distinct phonemes - but to an English speaker they all sounded like “r”.
Raised in upstate New York. (Those City people sure do sound ‘not from around here’) and I can’t conceive in what way “Mary,” “marry,” and “merry” can be thought of as not sounding identical. But when I moved there I noticed Kansans cannot hear or say the difference between “pin” and “pen.”
I’m not an expert so my explanation won’t be completely correct, I’m sure, but here goes.
Scientists have done studies to look at how people hear the differences in sounds. One such experiment looks at the difference between aspirated and non-aspirated consonants. One example I read about concerned the “b” and “p” sounds.
They took and made computer simulated sounds and then mixed them into various percentages of aspiration. 100%/0%, 90%/10% and then an through to 0%/100%.
They found that listeners do not hear the blend. They will either hear the sound as either aspirated or non-aspirated and there is a sudden break between them.
So, someone would hear
p, p, p, p, p, p, b, b, b, b, b
even though the percentage is changing.
What gets interesting is that native speakers of various languages will all hear the break off point at a general location, and that these locations differ among people who speak different languages.
Where a native speaker of Chinese may hear (A) a native English speaker will hear (B) in the made up example below.
(A) p, p, p, b, b, b, b, b, b, b, b
(B) p, p, p, **p, p, p, **b, b, b, b, b
The Chinese “b” consonant sounds close to the English “p.” Taipei should actually be written Taibei.
All babies have the ability to distinguish these sounds, but as the child develops, the mind starts to lump a variety of sounds together. Japanese kids don’t hear words distinguishing the “r” and “l” sounds so they all get lumped together.
This is good as it allows us to better understand various individuals’ pronunciation, but it makes it harder to rewire the brain to hear sounds we don’t grow up with.
The difference between a “p” and “b” in English, though, is not a matter of aspiration, it’s voicing. A “p” is unvoiced, and a “b” is voiced.
For example, an aspirated “p” would be the “p” in “pots.” An unaspirated “p” would be the “p” in “spot.” Both are perceived as a “p” in English.
^ETA: At least to my knowledge. I wouldn’t have thought that aspiration would make an English speaker perceive a voiceless bilabial stop as a “b” instead of a “p,” but I may be wrong.
That’s not where “yen” comes from. It comes from the first edition of Hepburn’s Japanese-English Dictionary (1867), in which エ and ヱ were transliterated to “ye.” This was in accordance with an earlier dictionary, penned by Walter Medhurst in 1830. Medhurst never went to Japan or even met with native Japanese speakers. He based his work on a Japanese copy of a Japanese-Dutch dictionary and accounts of people who had visited Japan while he was in Jakarta. In later editions, Hepburn corrected his transliteration system to a more phonetically-accurate “en” rendering of ヱン, but by that time, “yen” had already established itself as the name of the Japanese currency.
As far as the OP is concerned, Japanese makes an important distinction between long and short vowels, so that for instance, obasan means “aunt” and obaasan means “grand-mother.” English speakers who are not familiar with Japanese have a hard time telling the two apart.
English speakers also have difficulty with the sokuon, a very brief pause between two syllables. Kata, which is something you might do in karate is a completely different word from katta which can mean “(I) bought” or “(I) won”.
In French, there’s the whole category of nasal sounds /in/, /an/, /on/ that doesn’t exist in English. For minimal pairs, though, I think most English speakers have a hard time telling /e/ and /eu/ apart as well as /è/ and /é/ and perhaps /u/ and /ou/.
Huh… a Japanese linguist told me that, I guess even they’re not immune to apocryphal stories.
(With the caveat that his field of specialty is secondary language acquisition, not historical linguistics of any sort)
The Serbian ć and č both approximate to English “ch”. My Serbian ex tried about a million times to get me to hear the difference between them, and I never could.
Yes, true. But no, it’s not because I don’t worry about which vowel sound goes with which word, it’s because in my dialect, they all get the same vowel sound. It’s not laziness, it’s how it’s supposed to sound. “Mary was merry on the day she was to marry,” has three words in it that, again in my dialect, are absolutely identical and that’s okay. I can hear the difference when someone from a dialect that pronounces them differently says them, it’s just no more or less correct than mine.
On the other hand, the oft argued pairs “cot” and “caught”, “pen” and “pin” and “Dawn” and “Don” contain very different vowels in my dialect. Using “cot” when you mean “caught” isn’t lazy or lacking in effort, it’s just wrong and weird. (Again, if you’re limiting yourself to my dialect. There’s nothing inherently wrong with making them homophones if they’re homophones in your dialect.)
But…while I’ve got you Spanish speakers here…Can anyone tell me how to say the name of this restaurant? ñ
That’s it. The n with the squiggle over it is the entire name of the restaurant. I can’t begin to fathom how one says that sound in isolation because, yes, to my ear, the ñ is “ny” and has to be followed by a vowel of some sort. Is there a way to say it in your dialect?
The Reader’s review suggests “EN-yay”…agree? Is that a pronunciation of the letter, or the name of the letter, as “double-yew” is the name of “w”?
Yes. At least in Latin America, the letter itself is called “en-yay.”
It’s interesting to watch children make similar mistakes as they learn their first language. My two-year-old says “w” for “w,” “r,” and “l.”
Ah, thank you. I can’t tell you the weird tension it causes me to drive by their sign and wonder.
It’s a difference between “choon” and “tune”, or if you prefer, between “gotcha” and “got ya”. However, as a native Croatian speaker, I’d say there are at least four “degrees of softness”, depending on a region and a dialect.
Yeah, I wonder what the owners were expecting non-Spanish-speakers to call the place. “Nyih,” perhaps? But then there are some who aren’t aware of what the squiggle represents at all.
Surely, much as with “The Artist Formerly, And IIRC Currently, Known as Prince,” the owners knew that people would notice and talk about the place, and some of them would then eat there.
(You don’t “eat at” the Purple Musician from Minneapolis, but you get my analogy!)
Spanish has two r-sounds, ‘r’ and ‘rr’. Neither sounds like American English use of the letter, and Americans often can’t hear the single-r version as different from what they use.
I hope this link works, it is forvo’s example on how a Spaniard would pronounce eñe. Close enough to what I say, except I usually say it stronger.
That sounds don’t exist in English doesn’t mean they’ll cause trouble. And the vowels you mention, except /u/, all occur, more-or-less, in English. I think the troublesomest French vowel is /ai/ which is, roughly, midway between /é/ and /è/.