Re: Learning a language

From: LEE Sau Dan (danlee_at_informatik.uni-freiburg.de)
Date: 06/25/04 

Date: 25 Jun 2004 19:01:40 +0200

>>>>> "Rex" == Rex F May <rex.may@comcast.net> writes:

    Rex> *E is pronounced within a syllable as the English bEt, gEt,
    Rex> sEll, but when it ends a syllable, it has the "brighter"
    Rex> sound as in French "ai" as in lAIt, sAIs.
>> Why this complication for "E"? And why isn't there something
>> similar for the other 4 vowels?

    Rex> I almost left it out, and I may decide to drop it. I found
    Rex> that people tend to pronounce final -e that way, and, to
    Rex> preclude them making it sound like -ey I thought I'd permit
    Rex> the allophone.

What kind of people tend to pronounce it that way? Italians?
Russians? Chinese?

  But, it does sound like a complication and I
    Rex> should probably at least make it optional. I, myself, have
    Rex> no problem making the bEt e-sound at the end of a word.
>>
    Rex> And there are five "Weaks." Weaks are neither vowels nor
    Rex> consonants, but somewhere in between. They have vowel-like
    Rex> quality, but never form a syllable:
>> So complicated. These sounds are very difficult for many
>> people.
>>
    Rex> Maybe the descripton is difficult, but the sounds are just
    Rex> lmnrq. Who are they difficult for?

Pronouncing them syllabically is difficult for many. Does English has
the /ng/ sound? Can they easily pronounce the Cantonese surname(s)
"Ng"? My experience is: English speakers find the syllabic "ng" very
hard to pronounce. They're rather say "en gee" instead.

    Rex> The most objections have been to 'q,' but it's a phoneme in
    Rex> English, German, Mandarin, etc., and an allophone of /n/ in
    Rex> many other languages.

Spanish has an /s/, right? Do they find the /s/ easy to pronounce at
the beginning of a word when preceeded by a /p/ or /t/?
E.g. "station", "spain". Are these words easy to pronounce for the
Spanish speakers?

The problem is: in certain phonetic contexts, even familiar sounds
(familiar in other phonetic contexts) can be "impossible" to
pronounce.

    Rex> Stress falls on the last syllable unless it ends in a vowel
    Rex> (A, E, I, O U), in which case it falls on the next-to-last
    Rex> syllable.:
>> Stress? What is it? What a foreign concept!
>>
>> How are you going to pronounce a stressed syllable? With a
>> lower pitch? With a longer duration? And how to pronounce an
>> unstressed syllable? With a louder voice? With a supersonic
>> pitch? Rising tone?
>>
    Rex> Here I'm out of my depth. But, I'd say, stress in ceqli is
    Rex> as it is in English, German, Russian, Spanish.

What? English and German are stress-timed. Spanish is
syllable-timed. What do you mean by the above statement?

    Rex> Just about any language I know of has some way of indicating
    Rex> stress, either as pitch or loudness.

Tell me which Cantonese syllables in a sentence are unstressed. I'd
also like to know if Vietnamese and Thai have "stress".

    Rex> What would you suggest?

Forget about the vague thing that you call stress. Does
Malay-Indonesian really have stress?

>> Besides, how about rhythm? Is Ceqli supposed to be
>> syllable-timed or stress-timed? Or random-timed?
>>
    Rex> I don't know how my own dialect fits in here. Is this
    Rex> something that needs to be decided?

Yes. It seems you're taking the same mistake as many other conlang
designers: you assume that "stress" is a universal concept. No. I
don't think so. The concept is vague, too. Most English teachers
fail to teach us (Chinese) what stress is. Yes, there are symbols in
the IPA transcription in dictionaries. But what is "stress" exactly?
Nobody tells me. They simply assume that it is a natural concept.
But to a Cantonese speaker, that's a mysterious thing.

I've observed many Cantonese speakers (and also speakers of other
dialects of Chinese). Usually, they can't phonetically realize
English stress in the correct (as of native speakers) way. They
usually map the stress system to something like the tone system in
Chinese languages. They would thus memorize and pronounce syllables
with primary stress with a *high tone*. Secondary stress: middle
tone. Tertiary or quaternary stress: low tone. So, they don't do
much melodic variations when speaking English. They always pronounce
the primary stress with a high tone. And they don't tend to use
different loudness for the different levels of stressing and
nonstressing. In addition, they don't imitate the English speaking
rhythm, because Chinese is very syllable-timed (depending on variety).
So, they simply pronounce the English words in a syllable-timed
manner. That's what I'd call "typical Chinese accent".

I've talked about this with a few of these speakers. One of them was
frustrated that despite having learnt and used English for decades,
his colleagues (in Australia) still tell him that he has an accent.
He himself can't tell the difference between his accent and that of
his colleagues. So, I told him this thing about stress. He was so
surprised that he never discovered these differences. He told me he
never knew that stress has something to do with the rhythm. He also
found it hard to believe that stress != tone.

So, "stress" is something hard to learn, esp. because most of those
who do it natively cannot explain to a non-native speaker what
"stress" really is. Most Chinese speakers simply map the stress
patterns to tone patterns, and pronounce every syllable with the same
duration.

>> Here, you're doing nothing better than Esperanto's "16 basic
>> grammar rules".
>>
    Rex> Somewhat better, surely:)

I mean in the "stress" part, you aren't doing better. You only say
"stress on XXX syllable". You never explain what stress is, nor how
it is phonetically realized. That's like Esperanto's 16 basic rules
which talks about "articles", "plural forms", "tense", etc., without
explaining what these are. As though these were universal concepts
already mastered by everyone on Earth. That's a big mistake.

    Rex> It means 'sugar', and also can be interpreted as suk-er-o, a
    Rex> drop of juice.

Oh. I never knew this "-er-". 

-- 
Lee Sau Dan                     +Z05biGVm-                          ~{@nJX6X~}
E-mail: danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee

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