On Apr 22, 2008, at 7:17 AM, Mark Waser wrote:
In my experience it is not so much that they sound the same but
that we don't know how to say them (in terms of mouth mechanics)
such that we can isolate the difference between sounds that would
have been in the range of a single phoneme in English.
No. We have a Thai exchange student this year. There are words
that she swears are different that sound to me (and the rest of the
family) to be exactly the same.
Precisely my point. They sound exactly the same until you understand
the mechanics of the sound generation, at which point you have a frame
of reference for recognizing the differences. The differences are
there, you are just not using them as a means of discernment because
you have no knowledge of which differences are important for
discernment. This is why it is futile and silly to use sound examples
to teach someone a difference that we have already established they
cannot isolate. On the other hand, the phoneme generation mechanics
are relatively unambiguous.
I could never hear many sounds until I figured out what they were
doing to create the sound that was different from how I created the
sound. Once I figured that out, it became relatively easy to hear the
difference because I knew what to listen for.
Austroasiatic languages (like Thai) tend to be particularly difficult
for native English speakers because they tend to rely heavily on
complex usage of all the possible bits that English speakers do not.
However, having delved fairly deeply in one such language myself, it
is easier than it seems at first once you figure it out.
J. Andrew Rogers
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agi
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