Ask the linguist

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

[QUOTE=Fretful Porpentine]
Ooh, I’ve got a related question – why is it common for my (native-English-speaking, first-year university) students to use constructions in writing that they would never use in spoken English? For example, I read a paper recently whose author used the phrase “extreme conditioned people” to mean “people exposed to extreme conditions,” and I can’t imagine any native speaker saying that in conversation. Where do phrases like this come from?
[/QUOTE]

Well I’m not sure where that particular phrase came from, but it’s very common for there to be distinctions between written and spoken language. Typically the distinctions are rooted in etiquette and formality, with written languages tending to sound slightly more stilted than spoken to native speakers, but it’s generally the case that written language allows for some forms that spoken doesn’t, and vice versa. (Something really funny to look at is cockney rhyming slang; speakers tend to revert to a more conventional english whenever you ask them to write something down.)

62

[QUOTE=Testy]
You mention studying how adults acquire languages. I’m a native English speaker taking an Arabic course. Do you have any tricks, tips, or techniques that will help me excel at this?

TIA

Testy
[/QUOTE]

Hmm. Well, abjads (the type of writing system that Arabic uses, what with vowels being implicit) often give english speakers trouble, so I can’t stress how much constant reading will help you internalize both the written language and the pronunciation (I find that when I read a document in a language that I’m learning out loud, I pick up on some quirks of pronunciation that I missed when I heard the instructor produce it).

Another really good trick is to converse as much as humanly possible in it, preferably with other people from your class. Schedule a lunch date once or twice a week with a few classmates, and insist on only using Arabic: most days you’ll come up with some really useful questions to bring to your prof, and your proficiency is going to skyrocket.

Finally, I would recommend asking the prof to give you some specialized vocabulary about something you’re interested in. If you like mythology, ask for some short stories in Arabic, if you like biology, come up with some basic technical terms and see if your prof can translate them… the trick is that if you’re getting to talk about something you’re interested in, you’re going to find it easier to get motivated and learn new stuff.

I know all three of those are really, really obvious, but I still think they’re the most effective things to try.

63

[QUOTE=A. I. Wintermute]
I’m familiar with the basic history of Hangul, since the story is easy to find on the internet, but you mentioned it in response to a question about the design of the letters/characters being based on the actual anatomy of speaking. This I haven’t heard much about, and would very much like to.
[/QUOTE]

Sure! Hangul is a textbook example of a featural orthography, and you have graphemes which just mean “velar sound,” “coronal sound,” “bilabial sound,” and so forth, and you also get graphemes which indicate vowel height and frontness/backness in the mouth, although apparently there’s been some change since it was institutionalized, and a few vowel shapes aren’t pronounced like their location would suggest. Hangul - Wikipedia has a great breakdown which I assume is mostly accurate.

64

In the hospital and at the hospital are two very different expressions semantically in NA English. The former refers to one being hospitalized and the latter refers to one just happening to be present on the grounds of the hospital, say, as a worker or visitor. Although Semantics gets “a bad rep,” it’s a legitmate field of study. One thing that befuddled a couple of my classmates but which I found thoroughly fascinating is that each word or phrase in a language has its own Semantic set. The particulars of the word’s set is what determines how it may be used in a sentence and what modifiers (such as determiners) it may or may not take. Another example besides hospital is holiday. US English usually (always?) has the expresion on a holiday as opposed to the British on holiday.

Let’s not forget Pragmatics, another aspect of language. It may not be just the syntax and/or semantics of the expression in play. Perhaps Pragmatics is what’s driving the difference between US and British English.

65

[QUOTE=Autolycus]
To the OP:

What is your opinion on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis ? I took a class on psycholinguistics, and half the semester was spent talking about a book that discussed 12 experiments based on this theory. I think the book was called “Language in Thought” but I’m not sure. I’ll try to look for it later.

Me personally, I lean more towards the strong side. The 100% strong side is obviously false, that language concretely determines thought, but I think it’s more true than the opposite idea. In any case, it’s supremely fascinating, dont you agree?
[/QUOTE]

As a scientist, I’m still not sure. As a person, I think it’s complete bullshit and just another insane idea that Whorf thought up (he’s the one to blame behind that ‘Eskimos have 24 words for snow’ dustup. Apparently he missed the fact that what he was seeing was morphological variation, not new lexical entries).

There are a lot of convincing arguments on both sides, such as the guy who looked at deixis (words like here/there/way over there, which indicate the distance of the referent) in a bunch of different language and found that different languages had a different spacial concept of “here” versus “there”.

My own personal opinion is that your culture is going to effect the way you look at the world, and the way your language develops is going to be directly effected by your world view. As such, language carries invaluable information about the way your culture percieves things, and this is going to influence your own perception as you grow up.

So I think language doesn’t change the way you think or understand things; I think it acts as a vessel for you to learn the manner in which your culture views things.

But that’s just me.

66

[QUOTE=Acid Lamp]
My fiancee’ s mother is Icelandic, and while my fiancee spoke the language until she was five or so she has now forgotten most of it and has to re-learn it. Since I’m intriuged by the culture and language I’m attempting to learn it as well. I find I’m having two distinct issues that may be related to my being a native english speaker. Normally, I have little to no trouble reproducing sounds I hear, however two escape me entirely.

The first is something along the lines of “eh-thv” It is a fairly common syllable in the middle of words. I cannot pronounce it correctly or integrate into a word without adding a sort of japanese-ish “eh” or “ah” sound between it and it’s surrounding syllables.

The second is “Thot” or “Thut”. This one always throws me for a loop because it always seems to be swallowed, or mumbled within a word. I find it difficult to pronounce because it apparently is not supposed to be articulated, but rather sort of semi pronounced on the inhale.

Lastly they seem to speak at a constant mumble. I cannot distinguish any “words” out of a sentance. Is this common to Icelandic and other Norse Language groups? Am I doomed here?
[/QUOTE]

I suspect the “eh-thv” syllable is a voiced velar fricative, and unfortunately I never learned a language that uses it as an adult. I’d bring the sound up with your online instructor, or someone else who teaches the language; chances are if you have trouble with it, lots of other people do, and most good teachers will have a lot of experience teaching how to pronounce it.

I’m guessing that the “Thot” sound is a voiceless palatal plosive, which is a stop consonant made really far back in the mouth… I’m not sure what could be conditioning the inhaling sound, though. In general, your best bet is to talk to a teacher who explains how to pronounce her language for a living.

67

[QUOTE=Acid Lamp]
I’ll have you know I’ve been paying extremely close attention to what I’m hearing. I just can’t seem to reproduce what I’ve heard. Japanese is subtle, Icelanders mumble.
[/QUOTE]

:smack: Maybe my mom’s not the greatest example. Besides, half of the time when she talks in Icelandic, she’s busy doing other things like eating or smoking. You’re going to have a hard time finding a nonsmoking Icelander, though.

Like what Delphica had mentioned upthread, it’s going to take a while for an untrained ear to recognize the subtleties of these differentiated pronunciations. Maybe Omi No Kami could try to explain to you the oral formations and movements for the ð and þ sounds.

68

[QUOTE=nashiitashii]
I’m the fiancee. As he’s mentioned, I’m a passive bilingual. It’s really frustrating, as it’s difficult for me to pick up the speaking and writing part of Icelandic (again), even though I’m reasonably good at understanding when listening to a conversation. Any tips on how to try and regain a language that less than 400,000 people actually speak? I’ve been having a hard time finding stuff beyond the basics of The University of Iceland’s online programs.

Personally, I think that it’s going to take him time and a closer ear to get the sounds right, in addition to a lot of practice. Icelandic is an aspirated language, so it’s just going to be difficult for him because the pronunciations are a LOT more subtle than in spoken American English.
[/QUOTE]

Sadly, immersion is the single best teacher. Without immersion, I think your best bet is to find a local speaker community (if one is available) and hang out with them. Failing that, I would advise you get friends/family in Iceland to record TV shows in Icelandic for you. Sitcoms and the like are OK, but the best are talk shows that feature spontaneous conversation. Chances are they’re going to speak very quickly, which will help re-tune your ear to the language, and they’re going to remind you of any weird colloquial aspects of the languge which the textbooks just aren’t giving you.

If they’re easy to understand, I’d suggest you try explaining them to your fiance or anyone else you know learning the language; this will force you to produce the stuff that you seem to have no trouble percieving, and hopefully jump-start your faculties.

69

[QUOTE=nashiitashii]
:smack: Maybe my mom’s not the greatest example. Besides, half of the time when she talks in Icelandic, she’s busy doing other things like eating or smoking. You’re going to have a hard time finding a nonsmoking Icelander, though.

Like what Delphica had mentioned upthread, it’s going to take a while for an untrained ear to recognize the subtleties of these differentiated pronunciations. Maybe Omi No Kami could try to explain to you the oral formations and movements for the ð and þ sounds.
[/QUOTE]

Oh, you know the IPA!! Awesome. Hmm… are those the icelandic characters, or the IPA?

70

[QUOTE=delphica]

  1. How does hearing relate to speaking? I grew up in a an area where we pronounce Mary/marry/merry all the same, and when I moved away, it took me ages to hear the difference when other people said them, and then more ages for me to pronounce them differently.

  2. I work with adult ESOL students and my current challenge is helping native South American Spanish speakers learn to say an English “J.” Any tips on how to break the J barrier? Please note it would be greatly appreciated if you could word your answer in a way that a. I can easily understand and b. then in turn convey to students who are extremely new English learners.
    [/QUOTE]

Well, it’s related in a lot of ways. There is still some controversy over what the precise nature of speech perception is, but one extremely unambiguous link is what’s called a “feedback loop”. When we talk about speech production we talk about the Speech Chain, which is the series of events that occur between someone wanting to speak, and the other people hearing their finished articulation. Within the chain, an extremely important step is self-correction: speakers will listen to their own voice as they speak, and make miniscule corrections to keep the pitch, volume, tone, and the like at the level they want it at. We’ve found that if you stick a headset on someone and put it on a delay, such that they hear their own voice 4 seconds after they speak, or 5, or 2, it distorts their speech immensly. Kids are worse at self-correction with a delay than adults are, but both demographics really have trouble saying one thing while listening to themselves say something else. (you can observe this in real life by watching someone sing along with a song while wearing headphones, and witnessing how quickly they tend to go off-key.)

71

[QUOTE=Omi no Kami]

And that is that! Was that clear-ish? If you have any other questions, I’d encourage you to ask; linguistics is important to learn, and I think people’d enjoy hearing about the kind of stuff your program focuses on. :slight_smile:
[/QUOTE]

That post just made me swoon all over again melts into little puddle :wink:

But I’m also thinking in terms of historical language acquisition–there’s nothing that approximates that sound in the Indo-European or even proto-Indo-European language family, as far as I know… how would such a sound have evolved?

72

[QUOTE=Omi no Kami]
Oh, you know the IPA!! Awesome. Hmm… are those the icelandic characters, or the IPA?
[/QUOTE]

They’re the Icelandic letters, but I’d say they’re equals on the IPA. I was an Anthropology major who had a mandatory linguistics class. The teacher was great and interesting, but there were few linguistics courses available outside of “Mayan Hieroglyphics.”

Unfortunately, there aren’t too many speaker populations, and learning from my mother (again) and older brother will more than likely lead to me speaking 1950s Icelandic. :smack: I realize that this will lead to some issues with understanding at times, and a few native Icelanders (who still live there) laughing at language usage. :mad: :frowning: I’m sure I could possibly find a decent book to reteach me the grammar and vocabulary, as that’s what I really need help with. (Icelandic grammar is not unlike Latin grammar-- it’s tough and sometimes difficult to explain.)

73

[QUOTE=Kythereia]
That post just made me swoon all over again melts into little puddle :wink:

But I’m also thinking in terms of historical language acquisition–there’s nothing that approximates that sound in the Indo-European or even proto-Indo-European language family, as far as I know… how would such a sound have evolved?
[/QUOTE]

Well there are different theories, but the most common position is that clicks originally came from consonant clusters, particularly from two adjacent stops. When you think about it, you’re going to remember that speech production isn’t a step-by-step process: the tongue is always moving, and a lot of articulations tend to flow together. As such, over time it’s possible for stop clusters to occur more and more quickly, and eventually for the timing to overlap to such an extent that we get simultaneously closures, followed by the forward release described above.

74

[QUOTE=nashiitashii]
They’re the Icelandic letters, but I’d say they’re equals on the IPA. I was an Anthropology major who had a mandatory linguistics class. The teacher was great and interesting, but there were few linguistics courses available outside of “Mayan Hieroglyphics.”

Unfortunately, there aren’t too many speaker populations, and learning from my mother (again) and older brother will more than likely lead to me speaking 1950s Icelandic. :smack: I realize that this will lead to some issues with understanding at times, and a few native Icelanders (who still live there) laughing at language usage. :mad: :frowning: I’m sure I could possibly find a decent book to reteach me the grammar and vocabulary, as that’s what I really need help with. (Icelandic grammar is not unlike Latin grammar-- it’s tough and sometimes difficult to explain.)
[/QUOTE]

Well those sounds both exist in english, so I think what’s making them hard to figure out is something in the surrounding context. The eth is like the first sound in “this,” “that,” “them,” and that sort of thing, while the thorn is the voiceless equivalent, which occurs in english “thimble,” “thistle,” and “thrash”.

75

[QUOTE=Omi no Kami]
Well, it’s related in a lot of ways. There is still some controversy over what the precise nature of speech perception is, but one extremely unambiguous link is what’s called a “feedback loop”. When we talk about speech production we talk about the Speech Chain, which is the series of events that occur between someone wanting to speak, and the other people hearing their finished articulation. Within the chain, an extremely important step is self-correction: speakers will listen to their own voice as they speak, and make miniscule corrections to keep the pitch, volume, tone, and the like at the level they want it at. We’ve found that if you stick a headset on someone and put it on a delay, such that they hear their own voice 4 seconds after they speak, or 5, or 2, it distorts their speech immensly. Kids are worse at self-correction with a delay than adults are, but both demographics really have trouble saying one thing while listening to themselves say something else. (you can observe this in real life by watching someone sing along with a song while wearing headphones, and witnessing how quickly they tend to go off-key.)
[/QUOTE]

I’m intrigued now. I had a really bad speech problem as a child, which Wikipedia tells me is rhotacism (inability to pronounce the “r” sound). I had several years of speech therapy early on, but insurance/my school stopped paying for it before the problem was fully solved. All through late elementary school and middle school it remained an obvious problem. Then, in high school, the problem apparently faded away mostly on it’s own. By the time I started college, it was essentially gone to the point where several friends swore to me they couldn’t hear any abnormalities (other than a horrendous Philadelphia accent, but that’s another story).

Anyway, the odd thing (and the root of my question) is that I still can here a trace of the aforementioned problem. I’m always incredibly self-conscious about speaking in public and that’s part of it, because I’m sure that while people can understand me, there’s an obvious flaw to my speech.

Is that just me being crazy? Or is it an acknowledged phenomenon? Is it likely that I just learned early on to be very critical of my own speech and thus am sort of hypersensitive to it? I don’t really remember any of the therapy I went through, but I have no doubt that “listen to your own voice” was a big part of it.

Additionally, I don’t recall making any conscious effort in my teenage years to further reduce the problem, so I’m sort of baffled as to how it disappeared on its own. But that was when I first started studying a second language (Spanish) - would that be related?

Sorry for the length, and by no means bother yourself looking things up if you don’t know the answers. I have a good friend who’s working on her master’s in linguistics and speech therapy, and I love to bug her about this stuff, as I find it fascinating, but she’s always too busy with her actual work.

76

[QUOTE=Omi no Kami]
Well those sounds both exist in english, so I think what’s making them hard to figure out is something in the surrounding context. The eth is like the first sound in “this,” “that,” “them,” and that sort of thing, while the thorn is the voiceless equivalent, which occurs in english “thimble,” “thistle,” and “thrash”.
[/QUOTE]

They’re similar in English, but, well, Icelanders don’t enunciate in the same way, so things tend to get a little garbled. For example, since I can switch back and forth from the Icelandic and English keyboard settings:

Hvað is a good example of words that would be difficult. The “hv” makes a “kvw” sound, and the “th” is almost unvoiced. The whole word sounds like “Kvwa[sub]th[/sub]” rather than “Kvwath.” Uh. Yeah. It’s not an easy language to pick up. :smack: :confused:

Right now I’m attempting to explain meaning and grammar via answering “what does this mean” while watching Lazytown episodes in Icelandic. Some of those speakers have really awful speaking rhythms and cadences.

77

[QUOTE=NinjaChick]
I’m intrigued now. I had a really bad speech problem as a child, which Wikipedia tells me is rhotacism (inability to pronounce the “r” sound). I had several years of speech therapy early on, but insurance/my school stopped paying for it before the problem was fully solved. All through late elementary school and middle school it remained an obvious problem. Then, in high school, the problem apparently faded away mostly on it’s own. By the time I started college, it was essentially gone to the point where several friends swore to me they couldn’t hear any abnormalities (other than a horrendous Philadelphia accent, but that’s another story).

Anyway, the odd thing (and the root of my question) is that I still can here a trace of the aforementioned problem. I’m always incredibly self-conscious about speaking in public and that’s part of it, because I’m sure that while people can understand me, there’s an obvious flaw to my speech.

Is that just me being crazy? Or is it an acknowledged phenomenon? Is it likely that I just learned early on to be very critical of my own speech and thus am sort of hypersensitive to it? I don’t really remember any of the therapy I went through, but I have no doubt that “listen to your own voice” was a big part of it.

Additionally, I don’t recall making any conscious effort in my teenage years to further reduce the problem, so I’m sort of baffled as to how it disappeared on its own. But that was when I first started studying a second language (Spanish) - would that be related?

Sorry for the length, and by no means bother yourself looking things up if you don’t know the answers. I have a good friend who’s working on her master’s in linguistics and speech therapy, and I love to bug her about this stuff, as I find it fascinating, but she’s always too busy with her actual work.
[/QUOTE]

Hmm. Well, disclaimer: I’m not a speech pathologist, and I’m in no way qualified to give clinical advice, analysis, or conduct evaluations. Opinions given are strictly that, and concerns should be brought up with a licensed clinician.

whew now that that’s done. Offhand, it seems as if there are a few possibilities. Keeping in mind that /r/ tends to be the last sound kids acquire, and that some people just never end up acquiring it naturally, two ideas spring to mind: one is that as you went through puberty and beyond your palatte grew (which they tend to do), and whatever was inhibiting your production got resolved through the change in palatte dimensions. Another possibility is that you aren’t actually saying an /r/, but rather you’re substituting something clever that sounds very close to an /r/.

Otherwise though, I’d poke your speech pathologist friend until she gives you an answer. As a pure linguist I only pick up tantalizing hints of clinical know-how, but I’ll bet she can quote you a few similiar cases right off the top of her head.

78

Some of the discussion here has reminded me of a little factoid I heard a long time ago. The claim was that the reason that people have such a hard time losing their accent even after decades of living in a new country or region is because that by puberty the human brain has pretty well learned all the sounds it’s going to learn and the part of the brain responsible for that just sort of closes up shop.

Any truth to that?

79

Hey NinjaChick. I didn’t want to hijack this thread so I started another on in General Questions - **Help with Rhotacism (inability to pronounce “r” sounds) **.

80

[QUOTE=El Zagna]
Some of the discussion here has reminded me of a little factoid I heard a long time ago. The claim was that the reason that people have such a hard time losing their accent even after decades of living in a new country or region is because that by puberty the human brain has pretty well learned all the sounds it’s going to learn and the part of the brain responsible for that just sort of closes up shop.

Any truth to that?
[/QUOTE]

Heck, it starts far earlier than that. There’s a classic experiment in which a baby is given a pacifier attached to a pressure sensor, and listens to recordings of various speech sounds. We can tell when the baby hears a “new” sound because the rate and pressure of sucking goes up when he’s interested, and babies continually seek new stimulation. By alternating stuff like aspirated/unaspirated stops and velar/uvular minimal pairs, we can figure out what the boundary condition is for a baby to recognize two sounds as distinct. What we find is that at the youngest ages we’ve tested (I’m having trouble remembering; I think six weeks is the youngest case) detect all of the really subtle stuff, like aspiration and the like. The thing is, by the time they’re 2-4 months, the same babies will start losing distinctions that aren’t in the languages they’re being exposed to, and by the time they’re eighteen months old babies pretty much ignore distinctions that their language doesn’t have.