Fun Stuff > CHATTER
Random thoughts
LTK:
--- Quote from: Papersatan on 12 Jun 2012, 10:20 ---Many people are incapable of even hearing the sounds they are not used to. If your native language doesn't use a phoneme it can take a long time to even hear that the sound is different from one that you make. One of the steps in language tutoring is frequently just getting the student to hear the difference between the two sounds. I had to do this with my Chinese student and the sounds 'ss' and 'th'. She was unaware that she replaced "th" with "ss" (brosser instead of brother) and when I tested her we found that in unfamiliar words or words out of context she actually couldn't hear which sound I was making. She had very good reading skills, so she knew, theoretically, which sound words should be making, because she could spell them, but if I just said the word "myth" or "miss" she couldn't tell which one I had said.
You can't reliably make a sound until you can reliably differentiate it from other similar sounds.
--- End quote ---
This, exactly this. It's pretty interesting to see just how much automation the brain does to facilitate speech perception. You can even test people on their perception of different phonemes by digitally altering their sound, which shows that there is a very clear boundary between, for example, what an English speaker perceives as a 'b' sound and a 'p' sound. Like this! This boundary, of course, can vary quite drastically from language to language.
Asterus:
... "Kerfuffle"'s a funny sounding word.
Redball:
I love the word, use it when I can in an editorial. I checked an etymological on line dictionary: "row, disturbance, c.1930, first in Canadian English, ultimately from Scot. curfuffle."
But my first reaction to "funny sounding" was to think it's onomatopoetic, that maybe it's the sound barnyard fowl make when they're having a spat. It isn't, I suppose, but I like the thought.
pwhodges:
Shorter Oxford offers two possible etymologies:
from curfuffle - Gaelic car 'twist, bend, turn about' + Scots fuffle 'throw into disorder; jerk about; hustle'
or:
from Irish cíor thuathail 'confusion, disorder'
It also describes it as "early 19th century".
Papersatan:
From the full OED third edition goes with the car+fuffle. Fuffle is an onomatopoeia.
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