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

On Jul 22, 11:39 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 22, 1:48 pm, Dominic Bojarski <dominicbojar...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:



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.

Read it again. "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." Another poster on this
thread commented that for him, the English "n" seems to last FOUR
TIMES as long as the "n" in his language, which I believe was Dutch.
The same thing with Polish. Polish speakers break off the sound before
they get to the part that we English speakers need in order to
recognize it.

If you're unable to discuss language and linguistic phenomena using
the terminology that phoneticians and linguists have developed over
the past two centuries, maybe you should go learn the terminology
before you try to express yourself. The above paragraph _still_ is
uninterpretable.

Where did you get the idea that there's a later portion of a sound
"that English speakers depend on for recognition"?

From listening to Poles and noticing that they clip particular sounds
very short to the point that I can't recognize it. Final m and n
become merged with the vowel to give a nasalized vowel, and final l is
hardly audible at all or is merged with the vowel to form a diphthong
followed by the slightest trace of an l.

Ruud is given to flights of fancy, and most of his observation of
phonetics apparently comes from songs, from which you can tell little
about the duration of spoken segments.

Ruud has nothing to do with this.


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.

Non sequitur.

That's what I said.



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.

And it is one of the first things they learn. Without any difficulty,
actually. Learning to pronounce differences in vowel duration is a
different matter, though, and most Poles have a great deal of trouble
learning that. My boyfriend has been living with me for three years
and now speaks intimidatingly good English, except for the fact that
he just can't pick up the rhythm of the language, in spite of all the
time we have spent working on it.

Are you saying he can't pronounce the difference between THIRty and
thirTEEN?

I pronounce both with the accent on the first syllable. The problem is
not the stress.

(For whoever posted an earlier quibble: THIRteen is "list intonation"
or a product of stress retraction before an initial stressed syllable
in the following word.)

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.

Not at all. It stands out like a sore thumb.

TO YOU. Sheesh.

I remember watching Ali
G. with some friends in the States. One of them asked what a "bovva"
was. We concluded that is was a simply some slang word. None of us
figured out that it meant "bother".

I have never seen Ali G. No cable. Don't know what you're talking
about.

Does he say "Oh, bovva" like Winnie the Pooh? If so, it doesn't matter
that it's homophonous with the verb "to bother."

Go to youtube and check him out.:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB5VXJXxnNU


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.

Well, then what was it?

Why you hate lower-class Englishmen.

Beg your pardon? Put the bottle down, Peter. I've said precious little
about Cockney in this thread at all, and nothing that could be
construed as hateful.

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.

I'm not singling the Polish accent out at all. I lived in a Polish
speaking community until I was 22, and later in Chicago for five
years. Even though my ear is probably somewhat biased, I would still
say that the Polish accent is far more comprehensible than some Asian
accents.

BECAUSE YOU ARE USED TO IT. But of course you undercut your point,
which seemed to be that a Polish accent is all but incomprehensible
because it involves a stereotypical feature of Cockney English.

Willing to agree with you on that. As I said, my ear is biased. What
does Cockney have to do with this? Or anything? You made a false
conclusion somewhere, because I never said anything of the sort.

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.

No thing of the sort. I speak Polish myself, and would consider
carrying over English sounds into Polish to be a very bad habit on my
part as well.

Then why don't you teach your students to make the English sounds in
the first place, rather than telling them to make one inappropriate
substitution rather than another?

Because I'm not teaching them "in the first place". The students I
teach already have ingrained bad habits from previous teachers, Poles
themselves, who failed to correct the pronunciation, often because
they had pronunciation problems themselves. It takes a great deal of
time for Poles to learn how to pronounce [T D], and it's a lot easier
to do if they are starting with POLISH [t d] than with [f v].

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.

Non sequitur again. I said that using the phonetic similarity as a
justification for the substitution doesn't hold water. The reason for
the dispreference is, as you say, a different matter altogether.

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.

Unlike Franke, I wouldn't be able to live in a foreign country for a
prolonged period without learning the language. I learned German
before I went to Germany, and Danish before I went to Denmark. I came
to Poland specifically to learn Polish, and got right down to work.
Being aware of the differences between English and Polish has helped
me learn Polish quicker and easier.

You just said you grew up in a Polish-speaking community [in the US].
How did you manage to not learn the language as an infant?

You know precious little about language transmission in immigrant
communities.

The last immigrants came to my town in about 1920. After that point,
there was no influx of immigrants at all except an occasional priest.

Few of the immigrants learned English beyond the basic conversational
level. My grandmother never learned English beyond the elementary
level even after seventy-five years of living in the States, in spite
of the fact that she lived with seven monolingual grandchildren. She
was quite satisfied with the level he reached. Many immigrants never
learned English at all beyond a few phrases that they could use in
fixed situations.

Their children grew up bilingual. Extremely few of the grandchildren
learned Polish at all. There was only one in my generation (about 1000
individuals) that did. He was the last person to learn Polish in my
town, and was born in 1955. The strange thing is, he wasn't Polish at
all, but half Irish and half Slovak. His grandparents had switched to
speaking Polish when they immigrated to be better understood by the
rest of the town. The mother grew up bilingual Polish and English.

No ever has ever learned a language by passive absorption. That is a
myth. You only learn a language as a child if the language is spoken
directly to YOU, not just around you. I lived with two Polish speakers
who spoke exclusively in Polish to each other (mother and grandmother)
on a daily basis. After twenty two years, I learned about 100 words at
home, and about double that number from church hymns and carols. Even
so, this was far beyond what most of my contemporaries learned.

Sadly, I didn't learn Polish at home because my parents and
grandparents were not at all interested in teaching it to me, in spite
of my pleading. They thought that is was a useless waste of time. I
promised myself that I would learn the language, which is why I am in
Poland now, at enormous personal cost in lost income in the States.

Dominic Bojarski

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