[OT] American versus British spelling and pronunciation (was:Arbitrary abbreviations in phobos considered ridiculous)

[H. S. Teoh]

On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 01:55:45PM -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "James Miller" <james at aatch.net> wrote in message 
> news:mailman.235.1331210469.4860.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
[...]
> >Being British means that I do notice the differences in
> >pronunciation, I've pretty much done the opposite to Reagan, gone
> >from England to NZ.  I tend to get frustrated when I can't even
> >correct pronunciation because nobody can hear the difference!
> 
> I have a little extra insight into this as my mom is a speech/language
> pathologist:
> 
> As you've noticed, trying to get a person to hear the difference often
> doesn't work (And even if they can hear it, that doesn't necessarily
> give them enough info to actually pronounce it). I think the right
> thing to do, at least in cases where it actually matters, is to
> instruct them on the actual mouth movements involved. Then they can
> "feel" the difference, and start to hear themselves making the
> different sound. "Hearing" it can naturally follow from that.

I couldn't agree more! When I first started learning Russian, I simply
could not hear the difference between И and Ы. At all. They sounded
identical to me. Or rather, I notice there's a difference when a native
speaker says both sounds, but I couldn't pinpoint what that difference
was, nor could I reproduce the sounds, or distinguish between them when
heard in isolation. It took a lot of research to find out exactly how to
pronounce Ы (И is relatively easy), and a lot of effort to learn how to
tell them apart in different contexts, before I started "hearing" the
difference.

Now I was somewhat lucky that my mother tongue distinguishes between an
aspirated T (the T at the beginning of an English word) and a
non-aspirated T (the Russian Т, or, for that matter, the Spanish T). So
I had no trouble pronouncing the Russian T correctly, but another guy
who was also learning Russian couldn't tell the difference, and as a
result always spoke with a heavy "foreigner accent".

I can't say I've mastered it all, though... one thing that still throws
me off is Л and ЛЬ right before a consonant. I can do it right if a
vowel immediately follows, but I have a lot of trouble if ЛЬ is followed
by a consonant. I couldn't hear the difference at all. Now I can
somewhat tell, but I still slip up all the time when I try to pronounce
it myself.

Another thing is, I can't roll my R's. My tongue as stiff as a stick and
just refuses to roll anything, no matter how hard I try. I've tried to
follow online tutorials, but it just doesn't work for me. :-(


T

-- 
Doubtless it is a good thing to have an open mind, but a truly open mind
should be open at both ends, like the food-pipe, with the capacity for
excretion as well as absorption. -- Northrop Frye