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

H. S. Teoh hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx
Thu Mar 8 16:06:41 PST 2012


On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 06:45:34PM -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Nick Sabalausky" <a at a.a> wrote in message 
> news:jjavf2$1v3p$1 at digitalmars.com...
[...]
> > 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.
> >
> 
> Out of curiosity, I just asked her about this and she said that
> "hearing" it *does* typically come first, so I guess I was wrong about
> that. But she did say that failing that, yea, bringing in instruction
> on the mouth movements can be a reasonable next step as it brings
> other senses into play.
[...]

The problem with learning by 'hearing' is that, past a certain age, you
lose the sensitivity to certain sound distinctions that are not present
in your mother tongue. I suppose it's a sort of instinctive
"optimization" done by your brain: if a certain set of sound differences
don't matter, then there's no need to retain the extra resources to
distinguish between them. Lump them all together and treat them as the
same sound for higher efficiency.

English speakers trying to learn Chinese, for example, have an
incredible difficulty in hearing the "tones" -- because there is simply
not such a distinction made in English that saying something in a
different tone can *completely* change the meaning. Korean speakers
learning English, OTOH, have the hardest time telling the difference
between "fork" and "pork" -- because in Korean, "p" and "f" are not
distinguished. They just don't hear it, or if they do, they can't
reliably reproduce it. (Makes for hilarious dinner conversations --
"please pass the [fp]ork".)


T

-- 
Why is it that all of the instruments seeking intelligent life in the
universe are pointed away from Earth? -- Michael Beibl


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