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

[Nick Sabalausky]

"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote in message 
news:mailman.278.1331251506.4860.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
>
> 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.
>

Hmm, I don't doubt that theory.

> 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.

I've heared that in countries like China which have a tonal language, the 
percentage of people with "perfect pitch" is incredibly high - something 
like 90-99%. Whereas in other places, like the US, it's *way* below half the 
population (something like 10%, IIRC).

> 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".)
>

Fun :)