Extrapolating from what TokyoBayer wrote, a Westerner will hear the unaspirated unvoiced consonant midway between D and T as either a D or a T and possibly D listening to one speaker and T listening to another. I’ll bet some foreigners are confused at first that Thai seems to have two words for ‘eye’: /da/ and /ta/. Similarly for the consonant midway between B and P. (In standard transcription, /d/, /th/, /b/, /ph/ are used for the English phonemes with /t/ and /p/ for the intermediate forms. One once-popular text uses, less confusingly(?), /d/, /t/, /b/, /p/ for the English phonemes and /dt/, /bp/ for Thai’s intermediate forms.
Thai also has an unvoiced unaspirated velar related to G and K; it causes less trouble since Thai lacks the voiced velar (G).
Because it has extremely simple grammar and an easy-lo-learn basic vocabulary, many foreigners become fairly proficient at Thai without any formal training or textbook. I’ve talked to at least two fluent foreigners who didn’t realize Thai even had the intermediate forms /dt/ and /bp/ ! :smack:
BTW, educated Bangkok Thais distinguishes R and L, but these consonants seem to be allophonic for many in rural Central Thailand.
Nitpick: the nasals exist in English – I’m forgetting at the moment, but there are plenty of situations where various English speakers use them – but they’re not phonemic in English, so we’re not aware of them.
As I said, this is what I read, but I’m not 100% certain it was aspiration or voicing which they tested. However the research done by mixing the “b” and “p” sounds and then seeing where natives would hear the cutoff. Natives from one language would hear the shift at a different location.
I’ve also read about research if children who spoke a particular language could distinguish sounds which the adults could not distinguish. A classic example is the English “l” and “r” which Japanese adults cannot hear the difference without explicit training.
Mandarin has a number of sounds which aren’t in English, and not just the tones.
Well, my ex’s dialect must have been at the extreme end because I definitely never heard that difference in the way he said it. But thanks for putting it in a way I can finally understand!
I have New Jersey and NYC influences in my accent and Mary, marry, and merry have always been very distinct. This is one of the regions where the merger didn’t happen.
Actually, it seems that merging the three vowels is a distinctly American thing and that very few non-American accents have it.
Here’s a test for you. Try to sing Mari-mac, a Scottish folk song and tongue-twister about a, uhh, shotgun wedding <3. It relies on excessive references to “Mary”, “marry”, and “merry” to trip you up and make you flub up the words. If you have no trouble with it, you may be a Californian. Give the lyrics to a New Yorker and watch them contort their face as they struggle to make the constant vowel switches.
Mari Mac’s mother’s making Mari Mac marry me
My mother’s making me marry Mari Mac
Well I’m going to marry Mari for my Mari’s taking care of me
We’ll all be feeling merry when I marry Mari Mac
Yeah, all those rhyme to me, but “ceremony” I do appear to pronounce with a different vowel, so it’s not quite the same as “Sarah-mony.” Not sure why that word gets distinguished, but I’m pretty sure I pronounce that with a regular “short e” /ɛ/.
I have grouped the words into groups of words that rhyme with each other but not with any other one in the list:
Mary, scary, hairy, dairy (also rhymes with airy, fairy, wary)
marry, Larry, carry, Barry (also rhymes with parry, tarry, Gary, Harry)
merry, Terry (also rhymes with berry, very, ferry, Kerry)
So, “Be wary of the scary hairy dairy of Mary” rhymes, “Barry, carry Larry and tarry with Barry”, rhymes, and “Merry Terry in the ferry” rhymes. “Mary, marry Terry and carry scary Barry onto the ferry” is a tongue-twister.
This also means that elder woodfolk of legend that have their own boat service can describe it with the non-rhyming label of “fairy ferry”.
The confusion over ñ arises from the pallatal nasal /ɲ/ (represented by ñ, which is not a “sound”) not being phonemic in English. We usually equate it with /nj/, but of course /nj/ and /ɲ/ are different in Spanish, see unión and uñón.
Not this Brit. To me the vowel “Luke” is (as you say it is for Americans) like the one in spook or kook and different from that in cucumber or spew. I admit the difference between those vowels is subtle to my ear, but it is real enough. No way do I say “Lee-ewk” and I have never noticed another British person say it that way either. Perhaps there are some British accents where it happens - I can imagine it being said by someone with an “Oxford” accent, for instance, or something else very posh or intended to indicate being hyper-educated - but not my accent, and I don’t think most people’s.
Yeah, I’m not British, but I can’t think of ever hearing “Luke” being with a vowel like in “cucumber” or “spew.” (I’m assuming we’re talking about a “yew” sound here.)
Listening to the various audio samples on forvo.com for “Luke” and names including “Luke,” none of them have a “yew” sound for the UK English samples. Interestingly enough, the one that sounds a little odd to my ears is the “Luke Kennedy” pronunciation, which claims to be from the United States, near the Ohio/Pittsburgh border.
I haven’t met him but there is a friend of a friend, who was from Japan, but went here for highschool and spoke perfect English. He went home for a couple years and then there was the catastrophe in Japan. He messaged my friend on facebook “(friend’s name) I am arrive!” (alive).
Seems like you can lose the ability after gaining it too.
Filipinos when speaking english constantly confuse F’s, P’s, B’s and V’s, there is no F or V in tagalog. I once had to stop and try to decipher what someone meant when they said “He had to porpeet the game (forfeit)”.
I am not fluent but I understand a goodly amount of tagalog, I literally cannot pronounce certain sounds in it. The “NG” sound that we only use at the end of words in english is all over the place in tagalog words, I literally cannot pronounce “Pangalan” properly no matter how I try because of the NG sound is so different than what I am used to. I am super proud of myself for learning how to pronounce “mga” properly, I can’t properly discern “ng” and “nang” by ear though.
Njtt and pulykamell, I guess I stand corrected from standing corrected. The Brit who “corrected” me must have just found the American “oo” sound to simply be too flat and steady to his ears, and wanted me to add just a touch of “ew” – diphthongize, I think it’s called – which I’m sure you’ll agree most Brits do to one degree or another (Americans do, too, but just with the -w at the end, not the e- at the beginning). Not as much as any of us do for “cucumber” or “spew,” fine, you’ve convinced me of that.
Similarly for the consonant midway between B and P. (In standard transcription, /d/, /th/, /b/, /ph/ are used for the English phonemes with /t/ and /p/ for the intermediate forms. One once-popular text uses, less confusingly(?), /d/, /t/, /b/, /p/ for the English phonemes and /dt/, /bp/ for Thai’s intermediate forms.
