Category: Pronunciation

Sounds familiar

By Simon

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been learning the Polish version of Silent Night (Cicha Noc). While trying work out how to pronounce the Polish, I noticed that some of the the Polish consonants are similar to those found in Mandarin Chinese.

For example:

  • Polish c [ts] = Mandarin c, as in 次
  • Polish ć & c+i [ʨ] = Mandarin q, as in 七
  • Polish cz [tʂ] Mandarin ch, as in 吃
  • Polish sz [ʂ] = Mandarin sh, as in 十
  • Polish ś & s+i [ɕ] = Mandarin x, as in 西

Comparing the pronunciation of one language to another isn’t always helpful and can be misleading. In this case though, it gives me a better understanding Polish phonology.

Unintentional questions

By Simon

In many languages a raising inflection at the end of a statement makes it into a question. A post I read the other day on Invading Holland discusses the authors’ struggles with the Dutch language. Particularly the way he adds a raising inflection to the ends of statements, not because he want to make them into questions, but because he’s unsure if he’s saying them correctly and seeks confirmation.

This is often misinterpreted because rather than answering the unspoken question, i.e. “Did I get that right?”, people tend to doubt his sanity when he appears to ask them questions like “I’ll have a coffee?” or “I’d like to go to the station?”. He calls it the ‘The Unintentional Question Effect’.

When speaking foreign, I’ve also been known to unleash unintended questions on unsuspecting interlocutors, and have noticed others doing the same thing.

Speaking with a foreign accent

By Simon

I came across an interesting post today over on David Crystal’s blog about foreign accents. He believes that as long as other people can understand what you say in a foreign language, it doesn’t really matter if you speak it with a non-native accent. In fact your accent conveys your identity. He states that “it is very rare indeed for someone to develop a phonetic ability to the extent that their foreign origins are totally masked”, and that the only people who would really need to do so are spies.

It is indeed very difficult to speak a foreign language with completely native pronunciation and intonation, unless you acquire it at a young age. Having a training in phonetics certainly helps, as does prolonged immersion in the language. It also helps if you’re a good mimic.

I do my best to acquire as near a native accent as possible in the languages I’m learning, and my accent tends to improve if I spend a lot of time speaking those languages with native speakers. When people ask me which part of their country I’m from, or assume I’m from a neighbouring country where the same language is spoken, I know I’m one the right track.

Do you think it matters if you have a ‘foreign’ accent when speaking another language?

Hypercorrection

By Simon

Hypercorrection happens when people try to avoid making one type of ‘error’ in speech or writing, but overcompensate and apply the corrections to too many words. For example, those who habitually ‘drop’ their h’s sometimes add an h an just about any word beginning with a vowel when trying to speak ‘proper’.

One case of hypercorrection that has become part of the language is the saying ‘to eat humble pie‘, meaning ‘to behave or be forced to behave humbly; to be humiliated’. To word humble in this saying comes from the word numbles, which means the offal of a deer. In the 14th century, a numble pie was one made from such offal. By the 17th century, a pie of this type was called ‘an umble pie’, which eventually acquired an initial h through hypercorrection and became ‘a humble pie’.

Numbles comes from the Old French word nombles (loins), from the Latin lumbulus (little loin).

Other words the have changed in a similar way to numbles include apron – originally napron, newt – originally ewt. This kind of change of word boundries, which is common in English, is called metanalysis.

Dropping letters

By Simon

George Bernard Shaw once said:

“It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him”

Shaw, an Irish man, was to some extent poking fun at the English, but there certainly is some truth in his statement. English speakers have been complaining about the way other people speak English for very long. The same is probably true of other languages.

One of the things people complain about is the dropping of certain letters, such as the initial h, or of the g in ing endings. This is getting things the wrong way round and assuming that we should speak as we write. English spelling certainly isn’t the most reliable guide to English pronunciation. Initial h’s aren’t being dropped – they just doesn’t exist in some dialects.

Words borrowed from French, such as hour, heir and honest are usually pronounced without the initial h most varieties of English. Moreover, in American English herb also lacks the initial h sound, though the h is pronounced in some varieties of British English.

This post was inspired by the book I’m reading at the moment: ‘A Plum in Your Mouth’ – Why the way we talk speaks volumes about us, by Andrew Taylor.

Regional variations

By Simon

Last week’s language quizzes got me thinking about how the pronunciation of languages varies from region to region and country to country. When I hear someone speaking English, I can usually work out or guess which country they come from, and possibly which region. I don’t always get it right – I’m not very good at distinguishing US and Canadian accents, for example – but this is mainly due to lack of familiarity with the accents in question.

I can tell the difference between the Spanish of Spain and Latin American Spanish, but can’t pin speakers down to a particular country. The recordings I used for the quiz yesterday were all from radio stations, and I suspect that radio presenters tend to speak a fairly standard version of Spanish, which perhaps minimises the differences between the countries. If the recordings had been of ordinary people, maybe the differences would have been more noticeable. Or maybe Spanish doesn’t vary from country to country as much as English. Can anyone shed more light on this?

Can you tell where people come from by the way they speak your language?

The joy of phonemes

By Simon

I’ve been listening to Scottish Gaelic radio all day today. I don’t understand a lot yet, though can get the gist if I concentrate. As I listen, I often repeat some of the words and phrases I’m hearing – it’s a good thing I work at home most of the time, or my colleagues might begin to doubt my sanity. I really like the sound of Scottish Gaelic and enjoy trying to speak it.

Tha mi ag èisdeachd ri Raidio nan Gaidheal fad an là an-diugh. Chan eil mi ‘tuigsinn mòran fhathast, ach tha mi a’ tuigsinn an bhrìgh ma tha mi ag èisdeachd gu cùramach. Tha còrd mòr rium Gàidhlig a’ bruidhinn.

For me, one of the joys of learning foreign languages is getting my tongue round their unfamiliar phonemes. Each language presents me with a different set of phonetic challenges, some of which are more challenging than others. At the moment, for example, I’m having fun wrestling with some pesky Czech consonant clusters.

Which languages do you most enjoy pronouncing?

Why you no understand?

By Simon

Although I’m very used to hearing English spoken by non-native speakers, I do sometimes have difficultly understanding some of what they say. This is often because of mispronunciation and/or misplacement of word stress. Sometimes people have to repeat a word several times before I work out what they’re trying to say.

The same happens to me when I’m speaking other languages. I do my best to get the pronunciation and intonation correct, but am not always successful, which leads to confusion in the minds of those I’m talking to.

Sometimes it’s not the pronunciation, word stress or intonation that lets me down, but the way I put my sentences together and/or the words I use. I may get the words in the wrong order, or use words that are unusual or obscure. Fortunately in some languages you can get away with mixing the words up, as the word order is flexible.

I was talking about this with a Japanese colleague this morning. She told me that at a party she went to recently, where there was a mixture of English and Japanese people, the English people were all speaking English slowly and clearly to make sure that Japanese could understand them. Later she overheard the English people talking amongst themselves and found it quite difficult to understand them as they were speaking at normal speed and using lots of slang.

Regular contact with non-native speakers of your language can help to accustom you to a variety of foreign accents and ways of speaking. In the cases of languages few people study, their native speakers are perhaps less likely to have heard foreigners attempting to speak their language and might be less tolerant of mispronunciation and grammatical errors. I’ve read that this might be true for Czech. Does anybody know if this is the case?