Hah!
What I meant, is do some languages sound better to you? A bit of lingual elitism?
Are you talking about the actual sound of another language or aesthetics, concision, and style?
My typology prof tells me that the existence of any object-initial language has been disputed. I could be wrong- it just might be OVS. I was getting a wee bit carried away last night.
For those of you who aren’t familiar, it’s a thing on word ordering- whether a subject, object, or verb goes first.
English is SVO. The girl went to the store. Most languages are subject-initial. Verb-initial (like Irish) are much rarer, and the existence of object-initial has been heavily disputed.
Also, I don’t particularly mind making Noam cry. I’m a functionalist; that probably makes him weep as is. (I do have a very nice letter from him, though, which is an entertaining story in and of itself.)
Already- it’s a little complicated. Generally, people have a hard time hearing/pronouncing phonemes outside of their native tongue without lots of training. Most of the time they go for an approximation. This is why we all have accents. And if you brainscan people who are exposed to their native as opposed to their second language (or language that they do not know) phonology, different bits light up.
An archetype example is the Asian r/l distinction, although there’s some English examples- for example, we don’t make a distinction between a voiced and voiceless /th/ sound, which is a very important distinction in lots of other languages.
You hear something, but the question is whether you are hearing the different shades that allow a native speaker to correctly identify those sounds. If you are like most human beings, there are sounds that your brain cannot distinguish.
When I was taking German, I used to think those dummies who can’t pronounce the umlaut or the uvular r were just not listening carefully enough. Those sounds seemed perfectly natural and obvious to me, and it blew my mind that people constantly pronounced them wrong. Were they being deliberately obtuse?
Then I tried to take a little French, and found myself having conversations with my instructor like this.
Her: “Bleu.”
Me: “Bleu.”
Her: “No, bleu.”
Me: “Bleu.”
Her: “No, listen carefully, bleu.”
Me: straining my ears “Bleu.”
Her: “No, not bleu, bleu!”
Me: "I’m terribly sorry, but I cannot hear the slightest difference between those two words.
Her: shakes head in exasperation at stoooopid American.
Why was German easy and French impossible for me? My father is a native German speaker and my mother is fluent (frequently mistaken for native), and they spoke German around me and to me constantly when I was small. I can easily distingish and pronounce a uvular r or an umlaut, but to this day I have no idea what I was missing with the bleu.
Right after I clicked on this thread, I saw, “Bratz: why would parents allow children to have whore toys?” I thought, “I’ll open that one next.” Then I finished a newspaper story while the server finished opening this thread. When I looked back to the monitor, I got 2/3 of the way through andygirl’s OP before I realized I was not reading the “Bratz: whore toys” piece. That was a bit of a jolt.
“Who am I to blow against the wind?”–Paul Simon
by this you mean an aspirated alveolar plosive? cos I was thinking "What about ‘ether’ and ‘either?’ " and getting really confused.
Fuck, man, eight months after my BA and I’m already losing all my IPA.
“king” and “cat” don’t begin with the same sound, but you can’t hear the difference. If I’m not mistaken, there are languages where that difference is important.
And one of my favorite sentences: “The old man the boats.”
“King” and “cat” don’t begin with the same sound? How?
Real basic explanation:
Both words begin with a stop, where there’s absolutely no air coming out of your mouth. Stops are classified based on where the blockage is. In “king”, your tongue is fairly far forward in your mouth, but in “cat”, it’s a little further back.
The main differentiation among sounds is done on the basis of where the various parts of your mouth are. There are other factors that come into play–like how open your nasal passages are, or how much your vocal cords are vibrating–but that’s the big one.
Yeah, well the girl from “In the Cut” liked linguistics, too. A lot of good that did HER!
A better example would be “king” and “cling.” The /k/ sounds are different. In English, a voiceless plosive like /k/ directly before a vowel is what’s called “aspirated,” because the consonant articulation ends slightly before the voicing begins. So you have a fraction of a second where you’re articulating the vowel, but not voicing it. In IPA (well, sort of juiced-up SAMPA), it’s written [k<sup>h</sup>IN].
On the other hand, the /k/ in “cling” is not aspirated, because the voicing of the /l/ prevents the voicelessness of the /k/ from affecting the vowel. [klIN] - no aspiration.
IOW, the sounds are different, but English speakers can’t perceive it because those two sounds aren’t used to distinguish words - we couldn’t have two different words /k<sup>h</sup>IN/ and /kIN/. They’re “allophones” of the same “phoneme.” Sound strings with different phonemes are different words, sound strings with different allophones of the same phoneme aren’t different words.
And we often can’t hear the difference between allophones, just like “king” and “cling.” If I were actually to pronounce [kIN] with no aspiration, you would hear it as a normal “king.” But a Cambodian speaker, for example, would be able to hear the difference between [kIN] and [k<sup>h</sup>IN] because the aspirate and non-aspirate are different phonemes in Cambodian.
Likewise, a monolingual, ‘naive’ Spanish speaker may not be able to hear the difference between “vat” and “bat,” because ** and [v] are allophones of the phoneme /b/ in Spanish.
gak. For k<sup>h</sup>IN, read k[sup]h[/sup]IN. And I really hope all of the rest of it was correct.
Have an interactive IPA chart! Listening to the clicks is a lot of fun.
Matt, more like the difference between ‘this’ and ‘theater’ in some dialects. With me?
Cool, thanks! I think I’m turning into a language geek. And I like it.
Time to get working on those Tokipona comics… 
Are you sure about that, andygirl? My native language is English, but at about 7 I moved to Israel, and after a day or two I started saying my chets like a pro.
Doesn’t the real change in language-learning ability come at puberty?
Sunspace, for some reason people learn language much slower after puberty than before. Also a language learned after puberty will always have a slight accent, no matter how long you speak it. My father learned English at age 12 but still has an accent.
My mom’s a language teacher. I’m soooo proud.
One of those articles in the Language Miniatures suggested that the ease of learning languages was related to the growth and flexibility of brain development. Is any work being done to bring this developmental flexibility to adults?
And time flies like an arrow.