On Sun, 16 Jul 2006, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
The pronounciation bit is pretty interesting though...
It is also interesting how you Americans usually can't hear the
difference between the vowel sound Swedes/Norwegians make when
pronouncing "LyX" compared to eg "licks".
This kind of difference IS very interesting. And quite common.
Human languages have a vast store of phonological primitives from which
what we call 'words' are constructed. Each actual language uses but a
subset of these. All of the different sounds can be heard in children's
babbling, and each child has the innate capacity to distinguish among
all of those sounds. But the ability to produce and recognize all of
these different sounds vanishes as the child matures and its linguistic
abilities specialize. This is part of what makes it difficult for adults
to learn other languages and is one of the reasons that a native
English-speaker who learns Norwegian (say) late in life will, in many
cases, always speak with an accent, however fluent she may otherwise become.
My favorite example of this difference is difficult to describe but
impressive to hear. There are languages in which there are two different
sounds that English speakers would hear as "p". The difference is
whether the sound is aspirated, which corresponds, phonetically, to a
small puff of breath following the production of the "p" sound. The
difference is like that between the "th" sound in "that" and the "th"
sound in "thin". (Hold your hand in front of your mount as you produce
these words. You'll feel the puff of air.) The difference is relevant in
so far as there could be, though there is not in fact, another English
word "thin" in which the "th" was pronounced as in "that" or a word
"that" in which "th" was pronounced as in "thin".
If I remember correctly, there are no Eurpoean languages in which
aspiration is relevant in the case of "p". (I could be wrong about
that.) Hence, speakers of English and other such languages tend not to
hear it, and that makes learning languages in which the difference is
relevant difficult for such speakers.
Richard Heck
