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

On Jul 22, 1:48 pm, Dominic Bojarski <dominicbojar...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Jul 22, 2:10 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

My finger slipped and hit _something_ that cause the partial reply to
be sent. So I resume where I left off. I will apparently have to do a
third reply because there's a "read more" at the end of the message,
and I don't know how much, if any, content is contained down there.

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

With a great deal of difficulty, if at all. It's not at all a natural
substitution for most native English speakers. [f v] is not a very
useful hint that the speaker meant to say [T D]. Most native speakers
would leave the sound blank and try to fill it in based on the context
rather than relying on [f v].

THAT'S THE POINT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It has nuthing to do with "natural
substition" (whatever that may be), or unnatural substitution; it has
to do with acoustic similarity and CONTEXT.

Let's say that [f v] and [T D] are 99% identical. Native speakers
naturally ignore that 99% and focus exclusively on the 1% that
distinguishes them.

No. They focus on the entire utterance, the entire discourse.

Furthermore, learning to make the substitution takes far longer than
the length of an average conversation. This isn't a pure substitution,
either. First the listener has to decide whether the substitution
should be made or not.

I suppose it's too late in life for you to learn some basic
psycholinguistics. Language decisions like this occur during
milliseconds, not during "the length of an average conversation," and
they don't involve "decisions."

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."

Lexical words occur more often without sufficient context than you
would think, especially in brief conversations on non-mundane topics.

Examples?

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.

And what attitude do you suggest that I take? Live and let live, and

Yes.

let the students retain their unpleasant accents? Get real, buddy.

Your job as a teacher is supposed to be to teach them to speak
English. Since you have a problem with "unpleasant" accents, maybe
you're in the wrong business.

That's exactly what they're paying me to do. It would also be
inconsiderate of me not to reduce my accent when speaking Polish.

Hunh?

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.

Typo. "ALL of my native speaking colleagues". Without exception, every
single one notices it clearly and considers it a serious mistake.

Native speakers of what, colleagues where?

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/.

Duh, no. ALL of them, without exception, find it objectionable.

Who is "them"? Did they spend years in "public school" acquiring RP
and learning to despise the "lower classes" and the dialects they
speak? If you happened to know some feature that distinguishes, say, a
Liverpudlian accent from RP, would it "irritate" you as well?

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.

No they don't. It's simply not there at all. Nor is there anything
remotely like it. Period.

I suppose it's too late in your life to study a little American
dialectology.

They should be hearing something that is practically identical to the
Polish "a" sound (all of my American colleagues are cot-is-caught
speakers, as am I).

(My sympathies.) Does that mean you are teaching them to not make the
cot-caught distinction?????

The reason they hear "o" is because the see "o". I
grew up surrounded by Poles who learned English, but who remained
illiterate in it. They did not have this problem. In fact, their
accent, which was based almost entirely on listening, is fundamentally
different from that of my students, which is more based on familiarity
with how the word is spelled.

Then maybe you should set aside written English for the first few
weeks, and let them learn to pronounce the phonemes of the language.

Try having someone read you something in which all of the "short o"
sounds have been changed to "long o" sounds and see for yourself.

I lived 25 years in Chicago, frequently running into native speakers
of Polish, and never had a problem.

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?

Because it phonemic and unnatural. Any time the listener has to fill
in the blank for a word or sound that he can't guess, it impairs
communication.

Evidence? You listen to someone with an accent for a couple of
minutes, the magic computer in your brain makes all the adjustments
that are needed. Why, we could even understand the late Pontiff!

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"?

The listener who has to spend time and energy trying to figure out
what the speaker was trying to say. Again, it a case of first deciding
whether a substitution has to be made, and then making it. This takes
time, effort, attention and practice.

No, it does not. If you never interacted with people with accents
before you moved to Poland, you led a very sheltered life indeed, and
you may feel free to blame your parents.

It's also typical of African American speech, and it's one of those
(unconscious)

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