My original understanding was based on the notion that, say, Japanese language speakers just didn’t have certain letters or syllables (for instance, I know they don’t have any consonant-ending syllables except for some with -n, so that they “romanize” most words by adding vowels to the syllables, e.g., besu boru for baseball). Okay, fine, they don’t have (either) Rs or Ls.
Then a Japanese client mysteriously told me: “We don’t have a letter R,” which struck me as un-understandable in light of words like Ryoku and toro and Roppongi.
The crux of what I am getting at is that various Japanese (Chinese too) clients and acquaintances do seem capable of pronouncing (in English) both R and L, but just do so in (1) quasi-random (often wrong) fashion; or (2) 180-degree-diametrically-wrong fashion, as in the friend who pronounced “eyeglass frames” as “eyegrass flames” (really).
What is the explanation for, specifically, the transposition of Rs and Ls?
There’s no transposition; I think your theory that it is random is more accurate. Japanese, and I’m pretty sure this isn’t unique, doesn’t have an R or an L. It has a sound, usually transliterated as an ‘r’, that is pitched halfway between the two. Adults who have grown up speaking these languages usually can’t learn to tell the difference, and so they may make these mistakes at random. Kids exposed to English (for example) at an early age will generally learn how.
My understanding is that the Japanese sound written in romaji (the Japanese use of the Latin alphabet) as R is actually halfway between the English sounds L and R.
Japanese only has the one sound, and both of our L and R can be used to replace it and still be intelligible to Japanese-speakers. Since the difference between the sounds is not important in Japanese, it’s hard for native Japanese-speakers to distinguish the two sounds in writing and especially in speech… and if they are writing an unfamiliar word in English, they may pick one letter or the other by guessing.
I believe the same thing happens with English-speakers when they are confronted with the pairs SH and X, CH and Q, in Chinese.
The other difficulty, for Japanese, is the prepoderance of English words with two consecutive consonants. Most Japanese words are c-v-c-v-c-v… sort of like Spanish words. Confronted with a word like “frame”, a Japanese person will want to say something like “fu-ray-mu”. (We won’t get into the problems with “f” sounds here…)
“Glass” will be “ga-ra-su”.
It might be that the choice of “r” or “l” depends on the preceding consonant or vowel, and the person will pick whichever sound is easiest to make. It’s a bit easier, for instance, to say “fu-lay-mu” than “fu-ray-mu”, just as it’s a bit easier to say “ga-ra-su” than it is to say “ga-la-su”. In reality, the Japanese person might think he’s making roughly the same sound, just nudging it slightly in the direction of an “r” in one instance, and slightly in the direction of an “l” in the other.
One good way to figure out why Japanese pronounce Enlgish words the way they do is to try and spell out the English word using Katakana. You’ll find that there are some missing sounds, and lots of extra vowels. In fact, many English words are used in the Japanese language, although they will be written in Katakana. The Japanese person might have learned that very word and been pronouncing it that way since his early school days. The classic example is sa-ra-ri-ma-n (salary man).
I agree with all of the above, but would add that the principal problem has to do with the physiology of “liquids,” which are a way of using the tongue which many Indo-European (and probably other) languages can do in at least two or more different ways. Many Asian languages don’t have different meanings when these sounds are alternated. I believe this is what is known as an “allophone,” (please correct if I’m wrong, here). It’s something like the difference between the way many British say “water” and how North Americans say it. The middle consonant is different, but it doesn’t really change the meaning of the word, for either speaker. So for some Asian speakers, the difference between the “L” and the “R” sounds is similar to us in the difference in how Brits and North Americans say the middle consonant in “water.”
But the difference between the /b/ and /v/ in Spanish is more of a regional issue. In some places they overlap, and in others they mark distinction…at least I think. Again, please correct me if I’m wrong here.
My Japanese teacher referred to the sound as a “flap R”, because making the sound properly involved flapping the tongue against the roof of the mouth, much like making an “L” sound.
Just to add a note that hasn’t been mentioned yet, Mandarin Chinese has both L’s and R’s and during my time teaching English in China, I never noticed any problems among any of my students of confusing the two letters.
Indeed, it seems strangee that *romanji *uses an “r” for that sound because it’s actually closer to an “l” sound. The main difference being that the tongue only touches the roof of the mounth for a brieg instance (or it doesn’t actually touch the roof, but just comes very close), whereas in English the tongue touches the roof of the mouth for the duration of the sound.
No. <b> and <v> represent the exact same sound - /b/ at the beginning of an utterance or after an /m/ sound, and /ß/, the voiced bilabial fricative, in all other contexts. This is true of all varieties of Spanish. It’s not true of Catalá or Portuguese, so some border dialects may be heavily-enough influenced that they use contrastive sounds, but I’ve never heard that this is the case.
They’re quite different. I’ve never had trouble hearing the difference at all. <x> is a palatal fricative, while <sh> is a retroflex fricative. Completely different places of articulation. However, the sounds are in complimentary distribution - that is, there’s no context in Mandarin where the difference could matter. It always depends on the following vowel. I’m not sure if phoneticians thus analyze them as allophones of one phoneme, though that wouldn’t make intuitive sense to me.
<x> and <sh> wouldn’t be allophones of one another if minimal pairs can be formed by pairing these sounds with back vowels. Does the “retroflexion” of <sh> color a following <u> or <o>?
Uh, putting that into English… “xi” and “qi” are more or less pronounced with a puff of air off the front of your tongue, and “shi” and “chi” come from the back of your throat. They are indeed quite different.
God knows how to explain the Chinese “r”, as in “re.” I could never get the hang of it. In Beijing, the sound seems to come from the lungs.
Mmm, I’m not sure. If they are colored that way, it’s not very much. Phonetics is not my strong suit; I think that there is some retroflexion of the following vowel, but it’s nothing like <er> in English.
But you can’t make minimal pairs that way. <x> never precedes back vowels. It can only be followed by /i/, /y/, or /j/ (certain diphthongs.) Conversely, <sh> only precedes /u/, /o/, /w/, /a/, that one thing that looks like an upside-down “v”, and that one thing that looks like an upside-down “m”. My SAMPA-fu is weak. And I have no idea what the IPA is (let alone SAMPA equivalents) for <x> and <sh>.
Let me note that “shi” and “chi” have completely different vowels from “xi” and “qi”. The latter two have /i/ (like “she” in English) while the former two have an unrounded back vowel.
The alveolo-palatal consonants (x j q) are in complementary distribution (see minimal pair) with the alveolar consonants (s z c), retroflex consonants (sh zh ch), and velar consonants (g k h). As a result, some linguists prefer to classify x j q as allophones of one of the three other sets, commonly of the last one…
(you need to follow the link to see the IPA symbols for each–and there’s a handy chart mapping pinyin to IPA)
“xi” and “qi” are more or less pronounced with a puff of air off the front of your tongue, and “shi” and “chi” come from the back of your throat. They are indeed quite different.