Fun Stuff > CHATTER
English is weird
Morituri:
Yeah, I pronounce them the same way too. I can do the thing if I'm thinking about it, but nobody else hears the difference when I do, and I don't hear the difference if anybody else does. It has turned into a big old semantic zero, vaguely remembered in some fossilized spellings that may reflect the way words were pronounced in earlier versions of the language.
Like I said, I can't hear the difference. The difference absolutely doesn't *exist* in modern English. I was musing about whether the *ability* to hear it - which seems near-impossible to modern speakers - is because it's something that's inherently hard, or just something English hasn't trained us to do. Like, is there somebody out there who grew up with a different language, who'd find it easy to hear or obvious to produce?
My neighbor across the street had a hard time with ESL when he was a new immigrant some years ago. He is a native speaker of a language that doesn't distinguish the 'l' sound and the 'r' sound and had real difficulty first learning first to *hear* the difference, and then to *produce* the distinct sounds. Their language has *a* sound, made in approximately the same place in the mouth by doing approximately the same thing with your tongue, and speakers make the 'l' and 'r' sounds both as minor variations of it, the way we have but don't really 'code' the difference between the rounded 'o' and the front 'o' (Minnesota/Canuck/Newfie accent vs. "Mainstream Urban" American accent).
Meanwhile, his wife found it much easier and his kids who have grown up from toddler age to high-school age speaking English have no problem with it at all and don't seem to understand how their dad ever did.
And what I'm wondering, is whether we English speakers have done the reverse - actually merged two distinct but "close" sounds - sounds that once seemed obvious to speakers of some earlier dialect - into one sound, where the distinction is one that we no longer learn to even hear.
alc40:
Some languages do use both in a contrasting manner, but the 2 such languages that I know of modify one of the sounds a bit to increase the difference. So they're probably quite a bit closer acoustically than "f" and "th" are.
The 2 that I've found are Ewe (where the upper lip is raised more than a typical /f/), and Venda (where the /ɸ/ is pronounced with the lips slightly rounded).
Edit: In contrast to what I wrote above, this paper concludes that Ewe speakers don't exaggerate the difference, and the acoustic plus visual differences between the sounds may be sufficient to distinguish them without much difficulty.
FreshScrod:
Isn't there a langauge with only one word for blue and green, and all those colors (that we'd call green or blue) are often used as the same color? I think that might be similar to the "l" or "r" distinction. I don't know if it's the same about "f" or "ph" (what about "pf"?), but I have always thought "oof" was spelled wrong, like it should have a "ph". Maybe it's because of that lips thing, that if you're getting your wind kicked out of you, you're not gonna curl your lip up to your teeth, so the fricative-ness would come from the lips close to each other?
pwhodges:
Japanese is the well-known example. The classical word is ao (or aoi) which covers both. But later they added midori for green, which is commonly used; however, ao has not become restricted to blue, and will be used for the colour of a traffic light for go, or even by some for vegetables. Interestingly, this has gone the other way, and the "green" traffic light in Japan is often distinctly blue!
However, the overlap of these colours has actually occurred in many languages, as Wikipedia will tell you.
Morituri:
See, I would just translate that word as 'turquoise' which is a color name in English for a shade between blue and green.
However, it's also the name of a rock, which can cause confusion to an ESL speaker if they are familiar with one word and not the other.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version