Not really. There’s a very very very slight difference between them. In the same way that I pronounce “your” and “you’re” differently. The former has a long O sound while the latter a slight flattening of the tone and adding in an “er” to the “ou” portion.
It’s so very slight as to almost be unnoticeable, but it’s there.
This still makes no sense. You can keep saying “this is what we do” but I reject that. It seems clear to me that written language informs spoken language. You have offered no evidence that it does not, just arbitrary definitions.
You can call it idiosyncratic, but seeing as every spoken language started becoming more homogeneous once writing allowed it to be promulgated, I disagree. It would be idiosyncratic for a language not to be informed by its orthography.
As for when I was a kid: there were quite often times when I would hear someone use an unfamiliar dialect to say a word, and I wouldn’t understand that it was the same word. It was not until I was taught phonics that I realized they were the “same” sound.
I specifically remember not being able to read the word blanket, because the instruction I had been given that far told me to pronounce it [blæn.ket]. I had no idea the word was the same as [bleŋ.kɪt], and even when I grasped it at the time, I thought the book had made a mistake giving me a word with more advanced phonics than I had been taught. (The Montessori method: teaching the rules, then teaching the exceptions. No reliance at all on what sounds you’d picked up before that point, because they don’t assume you actually did pick them up, as the method was designed for those with learning disabilities)
Seeing as my personal experience contradicts your proposed theory, I need evidence to believe that you are correct. Quite a lot of science is made up of people saying something is “100% scientific”, but really contains non-scientific biases. Every discipline has axioms, and these axioms can be incorrect.
I will not accept something that contradicts my personal experience on faith alone.
So you actually do what we were required to do in singing. It seems like you speak with an earlier* version of the contraction, before it was completely contracted into a homophone of your. The fact that the difference can barely be heard is probably why some people started not saying it at all. I believe that is a known phenomenon.
*IN that it was likely created earlier.
You just proved my point. Your understanding of the word blanket was completely uninformed by the spelling. You understood exactly what it meant when people said it and you were able to use it perfectly. You were also able to distinguish it from any word that was constcted using different phonemes, such as say planks or blanker. Or even trimpok. When you heard someone say blanket you understood it as blanket. That the spelling confused you demknstrates that the elements that make up language precede the writing system and are independent of it.
I think you’ve misunderstood the claim people are making. No one’s saying orthography has no effect on pronunciation. Rather, there are two claims being made. First, languages’ sound structure is not reflected in their orthography. Second, people who speak a particular language don’t individuate sounds according to written symbols.
The first claim seems obvious enough–we all know that English has a sound structure that can’t be determined just by looking at its standard spelling.
The second claim also can be supported pretty easily. Most of us consider the spoken words “pen” and “let” to have different vowel sounds. Yet we all write those words using the same letter to represent the vowel sound.
:dubious:
I am not sure that the “/e/ in pen = /e/ in let” folks are actually outnumbered at all in the English-speaking world.
Oh really?
Oops.
Umm… Oh, I guess this is a better one:
Probably most American English speakers consider the spoken words “father” and “lather” to have distinct vowel sounds in the first syllable. But we write those two words using the same letter to represent those two distinct sounds. So then, we’re not identifying the sounds of our language by reference to the symbols of our script.
There you go 
I wonder how the "a"s in father & lather hold up in the various British and Australian dialects?
Hey … just for reference’s sake: Here’s a map of the areas of the U.S. in which speakers tend to merge the pronunciations of “pin” and “pen” (areas colored lavender).
Related article for further reading.
What makes you say this? And what do you mean by homogeneous?
And is that not EXACTLY my point? The Japanese language may very well have individual consonant and vowel sounds, when analyzed by a linguist, BUT JAPANESE PEOPLE DO NOT LEARN THE LANGUAGE THIS WAY. They do not think of “shi” as a combination of s+h+i; they think of it as one character in the alphabet. That’s why an American name like “Fred” is more easily thought of as “Fu-re-do” to a native Japanese speaker. They have similar consonant and vowel sounds as we do, but they do not think of them as seperate entities.
Why do I have to keep repeating this over and over and over? It seems awfully clear to me, and I feel that I am explaining it clearly, yet I keep getting arguments about it.
Sorry my use of language doesn’t fit your technical jargon, but I thought my point was pretty clear. I certainly explained what I meant by “syllabic”, so I’m not sure why you can’t understand it.
I didn’t say it was “weird”; I just said that’s how it is. Different doesn’t mean weird. German has 3 genders and English has 1. Does that mean English is “normal” and German is “weird”? Of course not. It just means they are different. In fact, syllables DO have a special status in Japanese. It is patently obvious by the fact that their alphabet consists of syllables as opposed to consonants and vowels, like ours does. Why do you pretend this fact does not exist? Why are you so fearful of the idea that different languages can have different features?
There have been threads about this. I am a native English speaking American, and I pronounce all of those words the same, and without context from the rest of the sentence I would not ever be able to tell anyone’s “merry” from “mary”.
If you’re talking about learning how to speak, you’re right of course. Nobody learns how to speak their native language by hearing explicit references to the sounds of the language together with rules for combining them.
On the other hand, if you’re talking about learning about the language, for example in order to learn how to write, then I’m not sure whether you’re right or not. I’d have to see a cite. Knowing, as I do, that there is a traditional way to arrange the Kana which clearly illustrates the way they can be broken into individual sounds (cited above in this thread) I begin to suspect that literate Japanese are aware of their phonemes as separate sounds, and even learn about this as part of learning how to write.
Maybe it’s not clear what you mean by “how a speaker thinks of her language.” It does seem as though there’s an unconscious sense in which a Japanese speaker “thinks of” language as requiring either a vowel or an n at the end. This unconscious “conception” (of sorts) of the language explains features of their dialect, just as you say. But it would be a mistake to say that their dialect shows they consciously conceptualize their language as consisting in syllables rather than in consonants and vowels. They call Fred “furedo” not because of the way they consciously conceptualize their language, but because their native language requires syllables of a certain structure and this issues forth in a reflexive pronunciation of all words, native or not, using syllables with that structure. It’s a reflex, not a way of concieving of the language.
What about “N” (I can write Japanese on paper but have no idea how to do so on a PC), in words like “Nin” “Sen” etc? The year 2002 is said “ni sen ni nen”.
There’s another very plausible way to explain the difference between Japan’s writing system and our own. Japanese only has a few possible syllables. English, on the other hand, has hundreds. (Maybe thousands, I haven’t done the math.) So even if syllables appear prominent to English speakers, they’d never create a syllabary for their language, because there’d just be too many to write down.
So having a syllabic orthography does not seem to indicate that syllables have a special status in the language belonging to that orthography.
I don’t think anyone disagrees with this. However, if we wanted to, we could all start writing English with “chunked” symbols, and that wouldn’t change how we speak it. For example, we could change the way that we write /bəˈnæ nə/ to something with three symbols, like “ђ љ ъ” – ђ = /bə/; љ = /ˈnæ/; ъ = /nə/. Does that suddenly make English a “syllabic language”? Something different than it was before? Even if we developed a unique symbol for every onset-core combination in English–with or without codas–we’d still be speaking the same way.
Japanese might have more “simplified” syllables–only cores without codas–but that doesn’t make the language any more “syllabic” than English. It just means it was probably more feasible for a syllabary (kana) to develop than an alphabet. The combination of phones are fewer.
(Maybe it also makes the use of Kanji more feasible.)
I still don’t understand your point, beyond that Japanese has a syllabic alphabet. That has absolutely nothing to do with the language, though, any more than the fact that we write the first sound in ‘ship’ with two letters means that it has two sounds, or the fact that some Japanese kanji represent entire words means that those words are somehow atomic or entire phonemes. No one’s disputing that kana are syllabic and part of Japanese is written with them, but that’s just a historical accident that has zero to do with the language.
Right, the moraic N (the second ‘n’ in nin, not the first one) is also a legal syllable. It’s a complete mora by itself, though; nin and sen both have two syllables each.
It is correct that you cannot break down an individual K sound (for example) in Japanese, but there are phonemes for a, i, u, e, and o. Japanese know a sound for ‘ka’ and a sound for ‘a’, so they can infer the isolate ‘k’ sound when thusly explained, but they don’t really grasp that it’s important. It’s kind of like how Americans often pretend that the Spanish ‘r’ and ‘rr’ are the same sound.
What’s really funny, though, is when Japanese do finally grok terminal consonants, and then hypercorrect. The sign of an advanced English speaker in Japan is that they pronounce ‘tomato’ as ‘tomat’. 
It’s not that native Japanese speakers are trying to map the Roman characters f-r-e-d to a series of kana and wind up with fu-re-do. It’s that Japanese forbids consonant clusters like ‘fr’ and syllable-final consonants like ‘d’, so they throw in epenthetic vowels to make it easier to pronounce. The cluster “fr” gets a “u” in it to break it up, and the final “d” gets an “o” after it to prevent a final consonant. It’s exactly the same process that happens when English speakers try to pronounce forbidden clusters in English: Russian allows one-syllable words like /rtut’/ and /mn’e/ (those apostrophes are supposed to denote palatization), but I can’t pronounce them without adding an extra vowel and breaking them into two syllables.