Re: Is it really true that native English speakers cannot tell 'skill' and 'sgill' apart?

Oliver Cromm wrote:
* Harlan Messinger <hmessinger.removethis@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

António Marques wrote:
On Jul 12, 6:27 pm, Harlan Messinger
<hmessinger.removet...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
Every example except the original one and the Ranetti one is of a
hearer making sense of something difficult by replacing it with an
expression that makes sense in the language, not by making up a
nonsensical proper name.
"Mondegreen" and "Ranetti", whether or not they exist, are not
nonsensical--there is no reason why they couldn't exist as proper
names
But it's true that that tells us nothing, because 'proper names' are
an open class admitting pretty much any string of syllables (even if
they have to conform to the language's phonetics, it is obvious that
the hearer wouldn't come up with a string that didn't conform). This
way, proper names are kind of snake oil in this context. I for one do
find that replacement with a grammatical expression feels different
from replacement with an arbitrary string. But then again, of course,
mondegreen and ranetti do sound like echt proper names.

and there is nothing about them that causes the perceived lyrics
not to make sense.
I think the objection is that it is one phenomenon to replace a phrase
by another, and a different phenomenon to replace a phrase by a
meaningless string of syllables and call the latter a proper name.
You're speaking of this, as Peter does, as though it's planned in advance, and as though the person planning it is doing it in a foolish way. If I perceive the lyrics of a song to be such-and-such, then those are what I perceive them to be. If someone *actually* says to me "I had lunch with Dave Picolas yesterday" then I perceive him to have said that he had lunch with someone named Dave Picolas yesterday, even if I've never heard the name Picolas in my life. If I hear Billy Joel singing about "Brenda Ranetti", then I don't consider whether I've ever heard that name before. "Brenda Ranetti" is what I heard. It isn't that I'm hearing a string of syllables that I'm perceiving to be meaningless, and then, for the sake of being able to call the thing a mondegreen, claiming it to be a proper name. I perceived it right off the bat as a proper name.

It's not a conciously controlled process, but it's a process
nevertheless, in which certain choices are made. When I hear a foreign
language, and a passage is a bit difficult, I notice how something is
happening, how my brain is struggling to identify the word boundaries,
even though it's not consciously controlled, it's more like when I
squint my eyes trying to identify a vague shape - and suddenly, it
clicks, and becomes clear. Occasionally, with a wrong interpretation.

This is all true, but nevertheless when there is an outcome in the form of a phrase that is clear to the listener but that happens to be wrong, that outcome is the phenomenon of interest. It's no use to say that in some cases, "You shouldn't have reached that outcome", and to refuse to include it in the class of items being studied. Linguistic study is supposed to be descriptive, not prescriptive!

Presumably, something similar happens in my native tongue, just faster
and below conciousness level. *And* - even when I heard something "right
off the bat" as "x y z", I can still, if that doesn't make sense to me,
try to reparse. It's harder than the first time, because the acoustic
information is fading away, but I sometimes succeed.

If the actual lyrics are "Brenda and Eddie", well, fine, but "Brenda Ranetti" is what I heard. I didn't plan it; I didn't assess whether it made sense in any of the ways Peter desperately wants to believe it needs to make sense in order to be considered a legitimate mondegreen. That's what I heard, and therefore that's the mondegreen I produced.

I'm with Peter in this to a degree (as little as I like admitting that).
To the degree that mondegreens where the words perceived are names are
much less interesting, because that could happen with any odd string of
sounds from any language, in principle. If a phrase is taken for another
phrase, however, possibly with different word boundaries, this tells us
more about language production and perception processes.
.

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