What does English sound like--REALLY--to foreigners?

Factual Questions
61

Vowels are still phonemic in Japanese. Syllables in the language are (ignoring length and [N]) either V or CV. Ume ‘plum’ has two morae, and ii ‘good’ also has two, with no consonants at all. The fact that every syllable is of the form [C]V does not mean that the phonemes are of that form, just that the possibilities for combining phonemes into syllables are more heavily restricted than in English. Phonemes are atomic; if they can be split into distinct, recognizable, meaningful sounds, then they’re not a single phomeme. English [ng] is always preceded by a vowel and must occur as the coda in a syllable, but the phoneme is [ng] itself, not [ang], [ing], etc.

The Japanese do consider ‘kono’ and ‘sono’ to have four separate sounds. It’s just that Japanese has only about 15 consonants and 5 vowels and requires every syllable to be of the form V or CV, so there are only 90 or so possible syllables. It’s thus easier to make a writing system with those 90 syllables rather than making a distinct symbol for each separate consonant and vowel, where you’d have only 20 or so symbols but words would be twice as long to write. (In practice, it’s more complicated than that. Consonants and vowels can also be geminated, which is indicated by vowels by writing the pure vowel after the syllable and by consonants with a special symbol preceding the syllable. There’s also a moraic nasal [N] that is its own syllable and can’t be geminated. On the other hand, a few CV syllables are forbidden (or, really, reduced when they occur), so that shrinks the syllabary a bit. Also, the writing system tends to use Chinese characters for roots and hiragana for inflections.)

I suppose you could try to dismiss vowels and consonants altogether and claim that the language has just 90 or so phonemes like [a], [ka], [sa], etc., but you’d run into problems quickly. Every single phoneme in this language would be syllabic, with no consonants at all in the language. It’s clear that [ka], [ki], [ku], etc. are very similar, but there’s no explanation for why the languages has so many phonemes of that form. Phonetically, the features of those sounds would be bizarre. You might be able to categorize [na], [ni], etc. as prenasalized vowels, but [chi], [su], [ra], etc. would be far more difficult to explain, and there wouldn’t be any similar phonemes in other language. Japanese morphology would be far harder to explain. Simple roots are of the form CVC with inflections of the form -V… added, making them legal words. Using your method, we’d have to reanalyse those changes as dropping the final phoneme, then adding another that varies a lot but remains suspiciously similar to the one that was dropped.

In short, it would be impossible to do linguistics with the language, and that form of Japanese would look like no other language on earth. That isn’t to say that phonemes are necessarily set in stone, though. Some treatments of Japanese analyse geminate consonants like ‘pp’ as being combinations ‘Qp’, where Q is some sort of doubling morpheme. (I’m not sure whether the analysis is that it assimilates to the following consonant, triggers doubling then gets deleted itself, or what.)

62

Yes, it’s technical. In simple terms, a lax vowel is one which is produced by a more relaxed mouth. So, for example, English speakers distinguish between the way we say “sheep” from the way say “ship” by producing a lax vowel in the later. That’s why, for example, when people want to “imitate” native Spanish speakers speaking English, they will substitute tense vowels for lax ones. (Spanish is pretty much all tense vowels.)

When Spanish speakers (or Italians, Japanese, etc.) “imitate” or make fun of the sound of English, they emphasize the “lazy” sound of these vowels in English–particularly the reduced/unstressed sounds of the many English vowels. It’s also sometimes a source of misunderstanding when speakers of those languages need to implement vowel reduction and don’t (E.g., photograph => photographer.)

As for phonemes: We should keep in mind that what’s phonemic in one language isn’t necessarily phonemic in another. For example, it’s not that Japanese or Koreans can’t distinguish or produce the difference between /l/ and /r/. It’s just that for them it’s not a meaningful difference. For English speakers, it is, of course. (Rice vs. lice, etc.)

63

I don’t understand half of the technical jargon you wrote in your post, but this part doesn’t seem right. You may feel free to explain to me how a Western linguist views the Japanese language, and I will take your word for it, since I did not study linguistics. BUT, to say that the Japanese have the alphabet that they do because it is “easier” seems quite inaccurate to me. They do not view the language as combinations of consonant and vowel sounds, as we do. It is an entirely different concept. It is a syllabic language. When American children are taught the alphabet, they are taught A, B, C, D, E… When Japanese children are taught the alphabet, they are taught a, i, u, e, o, ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, sa, shi, su, se, so… Shi, for example, is ONE CHARACTER in the alphabet. They are not taught to “sound out” the ‘s’ ‘h’ and ‘i’ sounds and string them together to “spell” the sound, as American children are, because those sounds do not exist as individual characters. There is one symbol for “shi”, and it is pronounced “shi”. The spelling out of the characters in the English alphabet is only done for convenience in a global culture. The characters, when spelled in “Romaji” are spelled out in our letters that roughly resemble the sounds of their characters. I understand your point that the constituent sounds exist, but that doesn’t mean that native speakers think of them as such, and it doesn’t mean they only spell them as single characters for the sake of “convenience”. Native speakers of Japanese have extreme difficulty pronouncing Western names that end in consonants, like Fred, or Scott, just as Westerners have difficulty with some Japanese names. Kaori is a common woman’s name, but I found that my American colleages had a great deal of trouble with it. For Japanese speakers, it’s a simple 3 syllable word: Ka-o-ri, but Americans have much trouble pronouncing two different vowel sounds in a row without an intervening consonant, and tend to end up saying something like “Kayori”. When we see two vowels together, we want to either blend them, because that is what English tends to do, or put another sound in between the two vowels.

It was my experience that it is a wholly different way of understanding words and their spelling.

64

New Yorker here. We also pronounce those words like you do. All three have distinct sounds, no one would confuse them.

65

The classification/study of individual phonemes doesn’t have much to do with a language’s orthography. Japanese linguists describe the individual phonemes of Japanese the same way any Western linguist would (e.g. Masayoshi Shibatani’s surveys of Japanese and other languages of Japan).

EDIT: This article ourlining the phonemes of Japanese will be of help. Notice that the chart given at the top of the “Consonants” section lists the consonant sounds independent of any vowels. Spelling doesn’t come into play at all when analysing the spoken sounds qua sounds. Keep in mind that languages without writing systems can be analyzed exactly the same way.

66

… though there are vowel-only hiragana.

67

Apologies – I thought you were saying something like “It’s gibberish in both directions, so there’s not much distinction across languages in the descriptions of the sound of ‘foreign’ languages”.

68

Fascinating thread.

I’m not a linguist-- couldn’t even follow half this thread-- but one question. I’m a native English speaker, so perhaps I’m biased, but I had four years of French back in high school, and have spent a lifetime around Spanish speakers, and for the life of me, I can’t understand anything in either language. I can pick out words in French, but with most Spanish, it’s one long morass of sound. No matter how hard I listen, I can’t pick out words from the “song,” as it were, even from educated speakers. English, on the other hand, has to be slurred quite a bit for me to fail to pick out distinct words.

Is that just native-speaker bias, or is that a feature of English that makes it distinct from other languages? Methinks it’s aided by not having those pretty-but-useless feminine/masculine modifiers cluttering up the language (why would a chair be female?? WTF??) and running the sounds together, but perhaps that’s just my English chauvinism at work.

69

I lost you somewhere :smiley: Is what “a feature of English that makes it distinct from other languages”?

If you mean “having a hard time picking out words in spoken French & Spanish”, it’s not a feature of English that burdens English speakers. I’d say, for you, it’s a matter of active exposure to both languages (or lack thereof). Simply being around native speakers (what we can call passive exposure) does little to improve comprehension once you’re past childhood.

Now then, once you “dive in the pool” and start interacting with native speakers in their own language – even if you have to start out at toddler-level speech – you’ll benefit a ton from that active exposure.

70

It’s likely that the difference between a stress-timed language like English and a syllable-timed language like Spanish plays a strong role in your perception.

Syllable-timed languages tend not to reduce vowels (schwas), so you tend to hear a lot more full vowel sounds than you would when listening to English.

71

I think you missed the point. I already conceded that I know nothing about the formal study of linguistics, and I gladly take your word for it as to how linguists analyze languages. But what I am talking about is how the language is structured, and it is structured in syllables, not individual letters, and that is how native speakers use and understand the language. When you say the linguistic study of the language has little to do with the orthography, that in fact reinforces my point (that is, if I understand your use of the word “orthography”, and assuming this isn’t some sort of technical jargon with an arcane meaning). To say that the formal study of phonemes has anything to do with how Japanese learn and understand their language is like saying the study of the physics of sound waves is how a concert pianist learns to play a C major scale.

72

You mean we all speak the Black Speech?!? :eek:

.

73

No, that is a feature of the writing system, not the language. If it were an unwritten language, or used an alphabetic script rather than syllabic ones, you would have no basis for making any such claim.

74

In a similar thread Nava, who’s Spanish, once said English, German and Dutch had sounded about the same to her, before she learned the languages. (Or to that general effect; it was English and one or two other Germanic languages.)

75

To me Mary and merry are different, but the joke does work such as it is. One thing about “merry” is that it isn’t exactly an everyday sort of word. After all, how often do we use it without the word “Christmas” immediately following it? So there’s bound to be some affectation or at least self consciousness at play when we do use it, which can have an effect on the pronunciation.

If I may bring up another LOTR allusion, regarding the name of the hobbit Merry, I always understood it to sound different from Mary. Otherwise it would have seemed odd to have a male character named Mary running around.

76

And if it were a tomato, it would be red. The fact is that Japanese is NOT an unwritten language, and it has a syllabic alphabet, so what’s the point of “what if’s”? Besides, what you say isn’t true. It isn’t just written syllabically, it’s SPOKEN syllabically. You’re trying to apply Western concepts to a language where those concepts don’t exist.

77

All languages are. In spoken languages, syllables are merely built of phonemes.

What concepts don’t exist?

78

Also, because of stress timing, a lot of the morphemes–grammatical markings for things like auxiliaries, past, articles, etc.–are pronounced so quickly and quietly that they’re hard for non-English speakers to distinguish. It seems to them like English speakers are kind of mumbling. In this way, English is a lot harder to pick up accurately by simply listening, and it’s likewise harder to speak in a native way from just reading it.

79

How exactly do American children “sound out” the letters S and H distinctly, in order to produce /∫/? It’s one sound. SH is just an orthographic convention.

/∫i/ is the same syllable whether you’re speaking Japanese or English. Don’t let (mistaken) reading pedagogy confuse the description of the language itself. Those Japanese children are producing the syllable /∫i/ just as the American kids are–long before any writing systems get involved. No one is teaching them how to speak. Speech is a natural phenomenon.

80

Crap. Sorry about that.

I’m not sure what a "syllabic language"is, but Japanese really does have consonants and vowels. The writing system of a language doesn’t determine any of its features. (That’s not exactlytrue; spelling often suggests hypercorrections, for example.) The Japanese alphabet (or, more technically, syllabary) certainly has a unique character for each syllable, modulo length, and no symbols for individual consonants in isolation. All this has absolutely nothing to do with the structure of the language, though. For that matter, most words are written with the root form in Chinese characters and the inflections in hiragana. Tabemasu ‘eat’, for example, is written as (complex character meaning ‘eat’) + be + ma + su, with the latter three in kana.

The Japanese root for ‘read’ is yom-. The nonpast form is yomu, and the negative is yomanai. The basic process for most verbs is nonpast = root + u and negative = root + anai. But the root itself isn’t a pronouncable block of syllables; it only becomes a legal Japanese word once a vowel is added to the final consonant ‘m’, because syllable-final consonants are forbidden.

Every language has syllables. Japanese syllable structure happens to be extremely restrictive, but there’s nothing particularly weird or special about it. It is true that syllables in Japanese all take about same time to say, as opposed to languages like English that stress some syllables versus others and adjust the timing accordingly. That doesn’t mean that syllables have a special, vaunted status in Japanese, though, nor that they’re irreducible blocks of the language.