Re: Subtitutes for English /T/ and /D/

On Jul 22, 4:54 am, Dominic Bojarski <dominicbojar...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Jul 22, 6:44 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jul 21, 9:29 pm, Dominic Bojarski <dominicbojar...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Five years ago, I moved to Poland and have since been teaching English
to Poles. All of them start out pronouncing [T D] as [f v]. Many

Do you not contradict yourself? This shows how similar they are!

To Poles, yes. To native speakers, no. No contradiction.

Poles who teach English themselves also do so. This is a extremely
irritating mistake and I correct it every time I hear it. As a matter
of fact, I tell them that it is an "unforgivable mistake", and to use
the Polish [t d] instead.

Why don't you teach them how to make [T] and [D]?? You're as bad as
Mark misleading his Hungarians!!

Depends on the level and goals of the student. It takes a Pole a lot
of practice to say [T D]. Not all of them are willing to spend that
much time on one sound of many that they have problems with.

It's a matter of proximal and distal goals. The proximal goal is to
stop the student from using [f v].

Why? Why is it "unforgivable"?

See below.

This is relatively easy and can be
accomplished quickly. The distal goal is to get the student to
correctly pronounce [T D]. This demands a lot of time and effort. It
is also a lot easier to do if the student is starting out from [t d]
than from [f v].

I do not mislead them at all. I tell them quite clearly that using the
POLISH [t d] is a compromise, but one that does not impair
comprehension as does using [f v].

How does that "impair comprehension"?

Because:

A) it's phonemic: free/three, brief/breath, whiff/with, fin/thin, vat/
that, fink/think, furrow/thorough, fought/thought.

In the few examples among those pairs that actually do differ only in /
T/ vs. /f/, how would communication be impaired by the substitution?

B) most native English speakers wouldn't even dream that the student
is trying to say [T D], even those who are aware that the
substitution occurs in AAVE, in which it does not occur at the
beginning of a word.

Most native English speakers are not hearing isolated wordlists when
they're interacting with other English-speakers, whether native or L2.

[f v] may be mapped close to [T D] on phonetic charts and in the
brains of some non-native speakers, but not in the brains of native
speakers. As I said, native speakers focus on the differences between
these sounds (which are small, but essential), and ignore the
similarities (which are large, but nonetheless not significant) to the
point that many are completely unaware of any similarity.

And therefore they automatically substitute the correct phoneme for
the phone that was actually uttered.

I doubt that many unexposed native speakers would readily interpret
"vose" (those), "boaff" (both), and "maff" (math) without sufficient
context. I also doubt that many of them would fail to notice it, as
you seem to think.

Utterances do not occur "without sufficient context."

Sean asked whether there were any American accents that use [f v] for
[T D]. Uneducated African-Americans often do, and this is considered
an extremely negative feature of their speech. Anyone who says 'wiff'
for 'with', or 'ax' for ask', is going to be at a disadvantage on the
labor market. It really raises hackles, including among better
educated African-Americans.

As Nathan explained, it's a lot more complicated than that.

And many, many educated African Americans have phonetic traits that
reveal their origins that they are simply unaware of -- this one
happens to have reached general consciousness.

To the point that it has become a shibboleth. It's not a matter of a
voice being recognized as African-American that is the issue, but of
the voice being recognized as uneducated. It has reached general
consciousness because it clearly stands out and sounds bizarre to non-
AAVE native speakers, few of whom are, as you said, acoustic
phoneticians.

Why do you claim it "sounds bizarre"?

Because it does. Extremely. Haven't you ever heard anyone with this
problem before? It's downright irritating.

I'm afraid that's a problem with your attitude, not with the speakers
you're denigrating.

ALL of my native speaking agree, whether they're from the States,
Canada, Ireland, Northern Ireland, England, South Africa or Australia.

"ALL of your native speaking"? Don't you realize that if you had said
that, no one would even have noticed the mistake? People hear what you
mean to say, not your slips of the tongue.

They were all taken aback when they first heard Poles using this
pronunciation. Even the one from London, who has probably heard it all
his life (48 years). As a matter of fact, he's the one who had the
biggest problem with it.

Duh. That's what I've been saying all along. ONLY the "one from
London" (scil. only the Brit) is aware of and attuned to the
particular negative sociolinguistic trait of [f] for /T/.

We spend a lot of time and effort trying to break this habit, as well
as several other habits that Poles have, including:

A) using the Polish [o] sound in words like "cop", "not", "want" and
"ball", which will be heard as "cope", "note", "won't" and "bowl". The
Polish [o] sound does not exist in English, except maybe in some
marginal dialects. Convincing Poles that it doesn't is difficult,
because they "hear" it in the speech of non-American speakers. The
sounds are radically different, though.

They also hear it in the speech of American speakers, because it's
their phoneme represented by the American allophones.

Again, how is communication impaired?

B) using the Polish [a] sound in words like "cap" and " bag", which
will be heard as "cop" and "bog". The Polish sound is the same as in
the English word "father".

Again, how is communication impaired?

C) pronouncing "it" as "eat", and "live" as "leave". Polish has
approximately the same sounds as English. The problem is orthographic
in nature. The letter "i" is universally pronounced like "ee" in
Polish. I had the same problem in reverse when learning Polish.

Again, how is communication impaired?

Millions of Spanish-speakers in the US also don't distinguish /i/
from /iy/ (or, if you insist, /I/ from /i/), and communication is not
impaired.

D) terminal devoicing, as in German. This gets tiring very fast, and
severely impedes comprehension.

Whom does it "tire"?

It's also typical of African American speech, and it's one of those
(unconscious) "markers" I just referred to.

E) trying to pronounce the vowel in "bird", "herd", "heard", "curd"
and "word" differently. They are convinced that they must be
different, since we spell them differently. Polish has an almost
complete one-to-one correspondence between spelling and pronunciation,
and they assume that English must, too.

That should be a simple matter for the teacher to explain. However, it
has nothing to do with the topic.

F) failing to complete n, m, l, and w at the end of a word. Polish
pronunciation stops far short of the portion of the sound that
English speakers depend on for recognition. We just hear "something"
that we cannot interpret.

I don't know what you mean by "complete" the sounds. American English
is chock-full of "unreleased" final consonants.

G) pronouncing silent letters as in "half", "island", "listen", "comb"
and "bought". They can't believe that they are truly silent, and that
it is not more "correct" to pronounce them.

Again, a problem with spelling. Nothing to do with the topic.

Our job is made harder by the fact that native speakers here mainly
teach advanced students in whom these habits are deeply ingrained
because they were not corrected by Polish teachers, many of whom have
the same habits. The students can't believe that their former teachers
were gravely wrong, or that the differences are huge and impair
comprehension.

Right, blame the English language or the learner's phonemic system for
the shortcomings of the educational system.
When the [f v] substitution is combined with these other problems, it
is often impossible to figure out whether a Pole is trying to say
"thirty", "thirteen", "forty" or "fourteen".

Isn't the notion of movable, i.e. phonemic, stress, among the very
first things you should have taught in the Polish classroom? THAT all
by itself could be the single most significant barrier to
communication.

Cockney is regarded as "British" and hence prestigious in the US.

As for Cockney, I doubt that many Americans are aware that the [f v]
substitution is a feature of that dialect. The first time I heard it,
I considered it to be a speech defect particular to that speaker.

The very fact that you noticed it marks you as unusual.

Aside from the [f v] substitution, there are no other similarities
between the Polish accent and the Cockney accent, so there is no
chance that an American would assume that a Polish speaker is speaking
with a "prestigious" accent.

That wasn't the question, was it.

An unexposed native speaking listener may be able to deal with the [f
v] substitution if it is the only problem the speaker has, but would
have to expend a great deal of effort trying to figure it out in
combination with the other phonemically significant substitutions that
Poles make.

Evidently you've never lived in a place with a great many Polish-L1-
speakers in an English-speaking community. Try living in Chicago.
Largest Polish-population city outside Warsaw, with still a very, very
large number of monolinguals, and Polish accents are no harder to
itnerpret than any other accents.

From the point of view of an ESL/EFL teacher, the [f v] substitution
is a very bad habit that has to be quickly eradicated. The phonetic
resemblance of [f v] to [T D] is simply immaterial, a linguistic
curiosity of no particular teaching value. Close perhaps, but
definitely no cigar.

The very fact that an ESL teacher conceptualizes his students' native-
language traits as "very bad habits" bespeaks a very unfortunate
attitude on his part.

And if he thinks that the _reason_ for the dispreference for [f v] is
immaterial, then he is simply not qualified to be an ESL teacher. We
saw exactly the same problem with "cybercypher" Franke, who (unlike
you) isn't even interested in why certain aspects of English are
problematic for his Taiwanese students.

.