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

On Jul 23, 12:22 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 22, 6:04 pm, Dominic Bojarski <dominicbojar...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:



On Jul 22, 9:40 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.

Yes, That is the point. The listener is forced to rely on context
because he is getting misleading, conflicting or just plain
uninterpretable phonetic input. And that slows the listener down. In
this case, the acoustic similarity is not all that useful in my
experience.

That is just asinine. EVERY UTTERANCE IS INTERPRETED IN ACCORDANCE
WITH ITS CONTEXT. There is no "slowing down" of the listener.

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.

Not when listening to a strong unfamiliar accent. They will be paying
closer attention and consciously focusing more on individual words and
sounds. The more familiar the accent becomes,

I.e., after a few minutes.

Hours of one on one conversation. You "few minutes" estimate is way
off.



the more they can focus
on the entire discourse, as you say. It greatly helps if the accent
closely approximates the listeners own and does not have many
distracting features to start with. That's why accent reduction is
important.

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."

Again, when listening to a strong foreign accident, the listener often
cannot decide in milliseconds and is forced to think it over, which
lasts considerably longer, on the order of seconds. The "length of an
average conversation" or longer referred to the time it takes the
listener to become used to the accent to the point that he can make
these decisions in milliseconds.

You are simply wrong.

No. You are.

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?

Listen to a conversation between a native speaker and someone with a
strong foreign accent. Every time the native speaker asks the
foreigner to repeat what he said, chances are that he couldn't figure
out a lexical word. Non-lexical words do not tend to elicit a
question.

Examples?



In the case of a foreigner with a very strong accent, the listen may
have to ask many, many times during the course of a conversation. I
once had a Japanese colleague who was a virologist. His lectures were
constantly interrupted with requests to write what he said on the
board. I also had a Pakistani co-worker, a microbiologist, that was
basically incomprehensible, in spite of the fact that he insisted that
he was a native English speaker. He had to give test results and
interpretations to physicians over the phone, but had to rely on me
and the other members of the team to do so because the doctors would
always ask to speak to someone else. In both cases, what they were
saying was "correct" in that the grammar and word choice were
basically spot-on. They weren't understood because of their bad
pronunciation and the fact that there was insufficient context to
interpret lexical content. In a lecture setting, they were essentially
worthless.

Don't tell me that you haven't ever politely sat through a lecture by
a foreign guest without understanding a word, exchanging furtive
glances of exasperation with your colleagues.

No, that doesn't actually happen. Maybe linguists and Assyriologists
are better educated than any other sort of professional.

It would make sense, since they are linguists, after all. Believe me,
it does happen in the world of biology and medicine.


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.

Most of my students are university researchers, physicians and other
health care professionals, and engineers. My job is to teach them
English to the point that they can freely discuss their subject areas
and be easily understood. Most of them are already highly literate in
reading, and sometimes even writing English. Their pronunciation, on
the other hand, ranges from poor to plain god-awful. Most of them are
planning on pursuing careers in English speaking countries. Their
accents would be a handicap.

So if your job is teaching them pronunciation (as opposed to teaching
them English), you have no business not teaching them to articulate
the interdentals, and to put the stress on the correct syllable.

No, my job is to get them speaking and to teach them the English that
they don't know, which sometimes means just about everything outside
of their field of specialty. Pronunciation is only a part of the job.
Drilling them on rapid speech production takes up most of the time.
Most have huge passive vocabularies and a solid passive knowledge of
grammar, but are at a loss when it comes to actually speaking in real
time.

My job is not to teach them perfect English pronunciation, only
acceptable English pronunciation.

This isn't "English for fun and recreation", as I think you may have
assumed. By the way, both Franke and Mark teach as similar
demographic.

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?

I still have an accent when I speak Polish. At first, it was quite
unpleasant, but now it's tolerable. I am constantly working on
improving it.

Good for you. How do you know whether you're improving? How do you
know you're not doing the equivalent of substituting [t] for /T/? The
Polish sibilants are particularly difficult: several times I asked Jay
Gelb to teach them to me, and I couldn't get them.



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?

English. Here in Poland.

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?

A mixed bag, really, ranging from high school graduates (useless) to
scholars and scientists. The [f v] distinction does not bother me in
the least because it is associated with any native accent. It bothers
me because it's wrong and can work against my students in the future.

Why do you continue to refuse to say where all these "colleagues" come
from? (:"Colleague" doesn't generally mean 'fellow expat'. It means
'people who work in the same office/company'.)

I already told you. Fellow English teachers here in Poland who work or
have worked either with me or in competing companies in my city. They
come or came from the States (PAx2, IA, IN, IL, CAx2, WA), Canada
(Saskatchewan) , England (Newcastlex2, Leeds, Leamington Spa, St.
Helens, London, Colchester, Bristol and a couple others that I don't
know exactly where they are from), Scotland (Oban), Ireland (Belfast,
Dublinx2, Cork, and one from somewhere in the middle of the country).
Australia (Melborne) and South Africa (Durban). Out of the thirty odd
people people listed above, only six are currently in Poland.

You won't find much of a classic expat community here in Poland as you
would in the Czech Republic. The number of English speakers visiting
Poland for longer periods is very small, and extremely few chose to
make it home. Teacher turnover is a big problem, with most only
staying a year or two, and some not even that. Recruiting is a bitch.
The Czech Republic siphons them off.

By the way, colleagues does not mean 'people who work in the same
office/company'. Those are co-workers. Colleagues means people in the
same profession, regardless of where they may be.

Dominic Bojarski




.

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