I’ve always heard that the voiced and voiceless dental fricatives are difficult for people to learn, if their own languages don’t have that sound. This makes sense, of course. It’s hard to learn how to pronounce sounds that don’t even exist in your own language. And I thought that’s as far as it went.
Recently, though, I watched a German video where the presenter explains how to pronounce ‘th’ in English, and includes a skit where he plays someone in the German Coast Guard, trying to communicate with an English ship that is sinking. “We’re sinking! We’re sinking!” says the crewmember on the ship. And the German replies, “What are you thinking about?”
It should have been obvious to me, but it just didn’t hit me until then that you also have to learn how to hear unfamiliar sounds in a new language. German umlauts can be difficult for us to pronounce, but they are fairly easy to understand, and there are frequently contextual clues to help. For instance, many noun plurals are marked by umlauts, but there’s usually an additional marking in the form of /-e/ or /-er/ at the end of the word, as well as corresponding inflections on articles, adjectives, and determiners.
Now I wonder how I would go about trying to teach a Romance language speaker how to say /h/. I don’t even know how I do it myself, but all the Germanic languages still have /h/ as an initial consonant and AFAIK none of the Romance languages do.
Spanish has the sound, or something very like it, as an initial in words such as jamón, Jerez, etc. It may be that some other romance languages do also; I don’t know.
But, in order for the speaker of a romance language to discern the /h/ sound at the start of a word, it’s not necessary that their own language should feature initial /h/; if their language features /h/ in any location, then they can hear and voice the sound. And difficulty they have in voicing it as an initial will be from some other cause.
I work at a company with a lot of people from around the world. One oddity about the th sound I’ve noticed is the sheer diversity in how it is approximated (both voiced and unvoiced versions). And of course that almost no one pronounces it correctly.
There may be more I’m not remembering. As you suggest, this may be as much a result of the speakers being unable to hear the distinction as it is their ability to form the sound.
The two things are basically the same. One of the features of language development is that, when infants are at the “babbling” phase they can hear and voice all sounds with equal facility. But the people around them react differently to the sounds that they recognise as language, or as the components of language, and the infant in turn responds by focussing on those sounds and in time loses the ability to voice, and in time even to discern, other sounds. So, when you were an infant you could roll your 'r’s as well as any francophone but, unless you were raised speaking French, you lost that, and if you reacquired it later in life you probably did so with some difficulty.
We know that people lose the ability not only to voice foreign sounds but even to hear them by listening to a non-native speaker imitating our particular language or language variant. I am a speaker of Hiberno-English; I am accustomed to hearing British English or American English speakers imitating Irish speech and employing sounds which to my ear are quite distinct from the sounds they are imitating. But they think they are the same sounds; they cannot hear the difference. And I have no doubt that this works in reverse if I attempt to imitate a speaker of British English or American English.
Quite. I was bemused to see some Americans write “veddy” as a marker for upper-crust British RP - I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything like that in the wild (a really old-fashioned RP drawl would almost lose the last syllable altogether).
But a lot of Anglophones can struggle with the Welsh or Icelandic “ll” sounds.
There are diagrams,
plus whoever is studying will probably have to spend some time listening to tapes, or native speakers. No idea about techniques specifically adapted to a Romance speaker learning English.
As an ESL teacher, I work with students helping them learn both to hear and pronounce sounds in English which they don’t have in their native languages. I basically work with native Japanese or Chinese speakers, but the principle is the same.
I read the theory years and years ago, so I could have some details wrong, but all infants can hear and distinguish any two sounds. However as the child gets older and their brain develops, the ability to distinguish unused sounds disappears. (Around five to six, IIRC.) Because Japanese only has limited “l” and “r” sounds, native Japanese lose the ability to distinguish between the two. For example, most untrained Japanese actually cannot distinguish between “flight” and “fright.”
There are various ways of teaching and it’s necessary to teach both how to hear and say the sounds. The use of minimal pairs is the most common method and repetition is required.
To teach pronunciation of a sound, you can teach the position of the tongue and mouth, degree of asperation, etc. and provide feedback. If there are similar sounds in the native language, teaching is faster.
Neither Japanese nor Chinese have “th” sounds so it requires teaching placement of the tongue.
There is a great deal of difference in people’s ability to hear and pronounce sounds and some people can never eliminate their accent while others are better at learning how to sound more like a native.
When English speakers ask how I pronounce my name, I give them my English pronunciation. It’s what I use when I’m speaking English anyway, because otherwise I have to switch to a subtly different set of vowels and consonants, and the English speaker won’t hear the difference or be able to use those vowels and consonants anyway.
And sounds is one thing, tone or pitch accent is even worse. I had a Danish teacher in high school, a speaker of a close linguistic relative of Norwegian who’d lived in Norway for at least a decade, and he could not at all distinguish words in Norwegian that only differed in tone accent.
When I learned Russian, my classmates and I all had problems with the “ы” sound, as it’s not present in English at all. It’s not an “ee,” nor is it a short or long “i.” Rather, it is something between the two. Difficult to pick up, but eventually, we all did.
I once came across a humor book in the Chicago Yaohan, called something like Is that “R” as in “London” or “L” as in “Rome”?
To my American ear, it does sound to me like most native Japanese do, in fact, swap the initial consonants on these words, but maybe it’s that I can’t accurately discern the one intermediate consonant that they actually use?
For exactly this reason I think it’s futile to insist on the exactly correct pronunciation of foreign names and other phrases. It can lead to hypercorrection without really helping to communicate anything.
My surname, also ultimately of non-English origin, is spelled as if there are three syllables, but we pronounce it as two. But when I spent a year in Germany, I pronounced it as three syllables just to make things simpler. Germans are familiar with “van” and “von” surnames, and I had less hassle there with explaining or spelling it to people than I do in America.
As do some Italian dialects: my cousin is a native speaker of one. But I don’t think any of the major dialects do. Wait, maybe Tuscan? Tuscan gorgia - Wikipedia
Not quite the same principle, but this reminds me of a mix-up that occurred when the American Chamber of Commerce in Indonesia put on its annual tennis tournament. Prime advertising space (banners along the fences around the tennis courts) was very coveted, especially among shipping companies, since foreign businesspeople were their primary customers and there was a great deal of competition among companies.
So, two different companies had each snagged the right to place banners in prime locations. The day of the big event came, and the banners were unfurled. One of them said, in big beautiful letters, “ALLIED PICKFORD FRIGHT FORWARDING,” delighting the competition.
It seems that an Australian at Allied called an Indonesian with less-than-stellar English skills at the banner-making company and given verbal instructions about what to print…
I was forgetting about Spanish initial “J”. It is a little different though, from an English /h/, isn’t it? Perhaps a little deeper in the throat? Diane Keaton’s character joked about this in Love And Death when she was pretending to be a Spanish noblewoman.
This too is something I never thought about, but it must tie in closely with the fact that children have an easier time picking up languages than adults do. I’ve always thought of that phenomenon as it relates to vocabulary and grammar, but it makes sense that phonology would tie in there, too.
I’ve noticed that phonology is usually considered part of the grammar in scholarly material, though it differs from how we use the word grammar in everyday language. To my way of thinking when I was studying linguistics, phonology seemed like a separate animal from grammar. I didn’t look into it much because I was always more interested in vocabulary and grammar. What you said about babbling babies leads me to wonder if the areas of the brain that handle the acquisition of all aspects of a language are all closely connected.
I was already aware that somewhat older children can usually hear the sounds of their native language long before they can pronounce them correctly. So we have situations like this:
Parent: [Points to a picture of a rabbit] Look! What’s that?
