Now you’re making me go back to my fishbowl comment. Those are foreign phonemes you’ve indicated, and still, they can be learned. But the distinctions of Mary/merry/marry are heard over and over on television and in movies. For an American to claim nonexposure to these phonemes and then claim one cannot distinguish them is disingenuous, unless one lives in a media-free environment. Again, not pronouncing them differently, I can see this being the result of growing up in an area where that’s the norm; but claiming you can’t hear the distinction, I’m not buying it unless you’re an immigrant from a non-English speaking nation.
If you haven’t been taught to distinguish them by ear, you won’t distinguish them when you hear them, no matter how many times someone on TV says them.
And there’s not necessarily a whole lot of difference between a “foreign” phoneme and one that’s just not in your particular dialect.
The difference between the dental/alveolar** and the retroflex plosives are salient to me – in fact, the use of retroflex plosives lends much to a stereotypical “Indian” accent. Retroflex plosives, IME, are easier to learn to perceive after you’ve learned to produce them.
As for the aspirated consonants … I’ve been meaning to start a GQ thread asking how the aspirated voiced consonants are supposed to be distinguished from the non-aspirated voiced consonants in Indian languages. The aspirated/non-aspirated voiceless consonants are easy to tell apart because there are English-language analogs. But whenever I try to apply voicing to, say, the aspirated “k” in “kit”, the voicing kind of makes the aspiration sound vocalic … then, to my ear, it just sounds like “git” (“hard” g).
If the typical Indian-language aspiration is stronger than that of the aspirated “k” in English “kit”, that would help my understanding of how the voiced versions cold be pronounced and how they remain salient at conversational speeds.
… The Anglo-American pronunciations of “Beijing” are different from the Chinese ones, but I don’t think the differences are that egregious. A lot closer than “Peking”, anyway Linguistic communities can cut each other some slack.
*** I am aware that, strictly, “dental” and “alveolar” are two different points of articulation.*
See you’ve done something interesting here. You’ve grouped them as (1) dental/alveolar, and (2) retroflex. A speaker of Hindi-Urdu or Bengali would group them differently: (1) dental, and (2) retroflex/alveolar. In fact, such speakers hear no difference between retroflex and alveolar. Indians think that Westerners can’t say the dental plosives correctly and when they make fun of Anglos speaking Hindi, they replace all the dentals with retroflexes.
Well, there you go. I’m not sure how I can explain how they are “supposed” to be distinguished. They just are different. Aspiration and voicing are two different things in Indian languages and the one doesn’t affect the other.
Both aspiration and non-aspiration are stronger in Indian languages than they are in any version of English. However, even if they weren’t, an Indian wouldn’t be confused on the voicing parameter. It’s either voiced or not. The aspiration doesn’t enter into it.
Indians do notice that Anglos can’t seem to tell the difference, say, between unaspirated [p] and **.
Quite so. Japanese people, I have been reliably told, lose the ability to distinguish the R and the L sounds from one another in early childhood, as part of the process of learning their native language (which has no use for the distinction) from the speakers around them. Later in life, they can only learn to hear the distinction with great difficulty, if at all. I one heard a Japanese lecturer, with otherwise excellent and barely accented English, completely bollix up the punchline a joke because of this, because he (to our English ears) distinctly said “lice” instead of “rice.” It was not only that he could not say it right, he had no idea that he was getting it wrong. [Japanese CD case]
Quite generally, although infants are born with the ability to distinguish all phonemes that occur in any human language, they quite rapidly lose the ability to distinguish ones that their native dialect does not distinguish as part of the process of first language learning it (the Japanese failure to make the L/R distinction just happens to be a good example because it is particularly striking to English speakers, for whom the distinction is very important, and thus clearly heard).
That said, may I add that, for me (who learned English in southeast England), Mary, marry and merry each have distinctly different vowels, and none of the words Aaron, Erin, heron, or baron rhyme with *any *of the others. I would normally (unless I heard an Aaron himself say it otherwise) pronounce Aaron as “air-on,” as in “It hasn’t cooled down much yet, because I have only just turned the air on.”
You’ve figured all of us out. It’s a conspiracy to annoy you.
By the way, Mary/merry/marry are all pronounced the same in California, where I am from, along with a pretty significant percentage of the media in the United States.
I’ve had a hard time finding good sound clips online. Maybe there’s a simple song or a speech recorded online that I can listen to? Better yet, a source that pronounces words in isolation, like maybe something geared to second-language learners.
Else, I can break down and buy the Hindi/Urdu language-learning tapes at Barnes and Noble Maybe I can find them at the local library, or get them through interlibrary loan.
Non-aspiration stronger? Does not compute Johanna, Wendell, or any other phonetically-inclined Dopers – a little help?
But if the aspiration is stronger … yes, that makes some sense. Tell me … does the difference between aspirated voiced consonants and non-aspirated voiced consonants get muddied up a bit over the telephone? Or is it consistently clear and easy to pick out over the phone? If it’s easy to pick out over the phone, there’s something you’re keying in on, and you may be able to describe it.
This takes practice, and remains difficult at conversational speed. This is also one of the joys of Thai.
I’d say Aaron and Erin are close but no cigar homophonically. As someone else illustrated, if I say them separately you probably couldn’t tell the difference but you would if I used them both in a sentence. That being said, I don’t know how many times I’ve encountered an east coaster who upon seeing my name in writing exclaims “oh, it’s SHARI !” as if I’d been prouncing my own name incorrectly. Not sure what they hear when I say it.
I took it to mean “more distinctly articulated as such.” In which aspiration isn’t there at all, not even a little bit. In other words, a stronger absence. Like a loud silence.
When I first moved to NYC, there were lots of new speech idiosyncrasies that I had to deal with, most of which were more obvious and more important than Mary/merry/marry. So it wasn’t until a few miscommunications that I learned to differentiate them. Same with Aaron/Erin. Now that I’ve relocated back to Ohio, I’ve had to re-learn to pronounce them all the same . . . otherwise I get accused of sounding like a NooYawker.
I can’t hear the difference between Mary/merry/marry in normal speech. Until I started hanging out on a usenet group that deals with some of these issues a bunch of years ago, I had no idea that there were people who pronounced them differently. Now if you and I sat down, and you said the words slowly and carefully, I would probably be able to hear a slight difference. But that difference, to me, would sound like the same basic vowel sound which you just add a little affectation to when you say them.
Several years ago, I was in Germany and was in a bar enjoying a beer with an Englishman who spoke fluent German. The beer I was having was called “König” and of course, being in Germany, was served in a glass with that name on it. I asked my companion how to properly pronounce it. From my POV, the conversation went like this:
Him: Koo-nig
Me: Koo-nig
Him: No - Koo-nig
Me: Koo-nig
Him: No - Koo-nig
Me: Koo-nig
Him: No, listen carefully - Koo-nig
Me: Koo-nig
Him: No…
Finally he explained that it’s like an “ee” sound but you round your lips like you’re saying “oo.” After he explained this, I could sort-of hear a slight difference. But to me, it still sounded like he was saying the “oo” sound but he just said it in kind of a strange way.
The point is that if you don’t grow up surrounded by people who make a sound distinction, your brain just doesn’t process that difference as a distinctly different vowel sound.
I was born in 1961, and in my younger years we had a TV but it only got one channel, so hearing TV newscasters was something that I was never ever exposed to. Maybe younger people will have an easier time with the vowels than I do because of the prevalence of TV.
I was “lucky” to be raised in a multi-language household, so I guess I retained more phonemes; plus being raised in NY I got the merry/marry/Mary distinction for free.
Not to stir shit up further, but these three words have 3 different IPA renderings, so can I safely assume that they “should” be distinct, but many regions have erased the distinctions (and don’t hear them)?
I agree with this. I pronounce marry/Mary/merry so that they rhyme, but there are a few Youtube videos where people pronounce various words and I can hear the difference. But like CurtC said - I had to know which word they were saying, listen very closely, and generally watch the video a couple times to really understand the difference.
Also, for me at least, I have to hear these words all at the same time. If someone says merry and then 20 minutes later mentions Mary, I wouldn’t notice the difference unless it differed greatly from my pronunciation. Or if they picked on how I said some word and taught me to say it “correctly”.
I still say pen and pin differently, so there’s that.
Oh, and I just thought of something - for hearing accents on TV, it’s not always an actual accent that you’d hear. I know that Kyra Sedgwick gets a lot of flak for her accent on The Closer, but I bet not everyone who watches the show know that it’s a bad accent. So there’s exposure, but it’s not to what people would actually sound like. Kinda like how the Australian accent most Americans would think of would be something like Steve Irwin, though I learned (from some thread here I think) that that’s not how most Australians sound.
What would really help everyone is a link to the sounds:
That site has audio files for different IPA depictions, with Amer and Brit variants. It’s been very helpful to me.
Look at my link. Listen to the Brit varients of father and hot (ɑ: vs ɒ).
“Properly” is a judgement. To those of us who do not distinguish them, that is proper, so someone who does make them sound different is just being weird.
The thing is, even if I hear them sounding different than I say them, that doesn’t mean I interpret that difference as being an intentional differentiation of the vowel sounds. If you said the sentence, “Marry me, Mary, and make me merry,” I might pick up that you are distinguishing the vowels, but otherwise I’d never connect the word “Mary” at the beginning of a conversation with “merry” at the end of the conversation and realize you are trying to make them sound differently. I would just think that is how you make the “marry” sound.
I can understand the distinctions you are making, but unless making a deliberate effort, “air uhn” and “ehr uhn” are going to be pronounced the same to me. If I concentrate, I might make a distinction on the “in” vs “uhn”, but usually will not.
Unless the words are juxtaposed next to each other, we won’t realize they are intentionally being distinguished, and will just assume the speaker is saying that word a little funny, like they do from wherever they are from, as opposed to here, where we say them [del]correctly[/del] the same.
How about, hearing it sounds a little different, but not recognizing that the difference is intentional, and just thinking, “my you say things weirdly”?
Although in this particular case (Aaron/Erin; baron/heron), the phonemes in question ARE in virtually all American dialects. I don’t think any American dialect lacks the “short a” of “bat”, and I know “short e” in “bet” is essentially universal in American English. The differences seem to lie in where these vowels can occur by the phonetic rules of the dialect, and how the vowels are affected by adjacent "r"s.
Linguistic communities can cut each other some slack.
