RPGWW

For as long as I can remember, I've pronounced albeit as all-bite, more or less, using the same pronounciation of beit as the german arbeit.

I don't know why, especially considering I've watched countless hours of cartoons in english during my tender youth; you'd think I would've picked up the right pronounciation; all-be-it.

Just another instance of 'look how wrong it can get' when rarely used words slip through the net of the swedish school system. At least I can pronounce character correctly, you'd be surprised by how many people around here use the 'ch' sound of ketchup, or 'check' when saying it.

Christian wrote:At least I can pronounce character correctly, you'd be surprised by how many people around here use the 'ch' sound of ketchup, or 'check' when saying it.

That's awesome.

My name, Cheryl, has a CH that's pronounced as the SH (as in 'ship'). The only useful thing I remember learning in speech therapy was to not assume that was always the pattern, but to pay attention to words with CH in them and learn how to pronounce them. I remember 'cheese' and 'chair' specifically being used as examples.

*nods* Swedes have an almost unanimous problem with ch-sounds. As I mentioned, character uses the ketchup-y ch, but heaven knows no one here can distinguish between cheap and sheep. And we always get our w's and v's mixed up. =D

But did you have to go to speech therapy 'cause you learned to pronounce ch as sh? That must've been really difficult to un-learn.

Christian wrote:But did you have to go to speech therapy 'cause you learned to pronounce ch as sh? That must've been really difficult to un-learn.

No, actually. When I started speaking, I used to cut off the beginnings and ends of both words and sentences. I was completely unintelligible--to the point that my parents didn't realize I was actually talking until they took me to a specialist who diagnosed what was going on. He and other doctors suggested that they just leave me alone till I sorted it out, but my parents figured that it would probably do me a lot of good if they insured I was speaking intelligibly before I started school. For the record, I'm pretty sure they were right, but it's hard to accurately judge decisions made when I was 3.

Other useless information: After learning the importance of chairs and cheese, I spent most of my time in speech therapy (several years) trying to figure out how to properly pronounce the midwestern R. Note that my name has an R in it. When introducing myself as a very young child, too many people mistook my name for 'Michelle', 'Shell / 'Chelle', or 'Shelly', and maybe half the people I met asked me "Where are you from?", assuming I was [1] foreign-born, or [2] from a very different part of the country. I eventually learned how to fake mastery of that mysterious sound after leaving speech therapy and now very few people think I am foreign-born. But I still occassionally answer to Michelle in stores.

The midwestern R... Would that be the Retroflex (Retroflective?) R where you fold your tongue kind of backwards?

Asking mostly out of curiousity as I only recently learned of its name, I'm studying linguistics this semester and World Englishes proved to be quite the interesting topic. =D

As for my own experience, I had some severe problems with my S's when I was a kid... but then again, I don't think that's very rare. I used to practice reading a book in first or second grade called "Snäckan Snick", which was about a seashell-living molusc enjoying life at the bottom of the ocean. I barely remember anything but this whooping, humming machine that somehow (I still think there was some kind of imp controlling it) measured how much I hissed into the microphone... traumatic.

Other than that, I've always had the tendency to forget words, but when I was a kid I used to forget pronounciations of stuff. Statoil, the name of a gas-station franchise from Norway, was usually pronounced "Stattolj" or some such, but for a period of almost two years, I had sudden trouble in pronouncing it, saying instead "statt-toeel".

Probably psychological.

And now you have some completely useless trivia about me.

Still, it's amazing really how children develop these linguistic skills, so incredibly different from how adults approach it.

Christian wrote:The midwestern R... Would that be the Retroflex (Retroflective?) R where you fold your tongue kind of backwards?

Asking mostly out of curiousity as I only recently learned of its name, I'm studying linguistics this semester and World Englishes proved to be quite the interesting topic. =D

I originally typed 'the English R', but realized that might read strangely since I don't live in England, and there isn't any one 'American R' (any more than there's an 'English R', I'm sure). I figure that's the most accurate way to describe it, aside from 'standard American English dialect', which is a mouthful.

According to Wikipedia, "many Americans realize the phoneme /ɹ/ [...] as a retroflex approximant [ɻ]". It also tells us that in a retroflex approximant the "place of articulation is retroflex, which prototypically means it is articulated with the tip of the tongue curled up, but more generally means that it is postalveolar without being palatalized."

The latter description best describes how I make Rs--with the tongue tip curled (pointing down, not up) and pushed right up against the back of the alveolar ridge. But I'm probably not the best to consult regarding the proper pronunciation of standard English, for more reasons than one. But I hear Spleen's studying Linguistics!

Christian wrote:I barely remember anything but this whooping, humming machine that somehow (I still think there was some kind of imp controlling it) measured how much I hissed into the microphone... traumatic.

Haha, wow, that's terrible.

"Don't worry, little Christian, it's just a machine that measures how well you are speaking. It won't eat you if you perform poorly or anything...OR WILL IT?"

Christian wrote:Still, it's amazing really how children develop these linguistic skills, so incredibly different from how adults approach it.

Yeah, language acquisition is completely different from learning a language. I wish more people knew that when they start ragging on immigrants (or Americans from different parts of the country who learned a non-standard dialect) for being gosh-darned lazy bums who are too stupid to learn proper English like they did!

pd Rydia wrote:But I hear Spleen's studying Linguistics!

You heard right!

I haven't heard too much about the retroflex approximant, but it does appear on the master IPA chart for the phonology course I'm in. Paying close attention to my tongue, I think I might have learned the retroflex approximant, even though the English standard (even American English) is nominally the alveolar approximant. I think the real test is this: How much do you feel your tongue move when you go from /r/ to /l/? If it's mostly flattening and widening for the /l/, then you're probably using the alveolar approximant [ɹ]. If it's snapping forward as well, then you may have the retroflex approximant [ɻ]. Unless you're from India, I doubt anyone here has the retroflex lateral approximant [ɭ] for the phoneme /l/, so that shouldn't affect anyone trying to test it.

Humorously enough: Dia, my dear, it sounds like you're describing the features of [ɹ] when you describe your pronunciation of /r/, not [ɻ]. My /r/ goes nowhere near the alveolar ridge.

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I think I might have learned the retroflex approximant, even though the English standard (even American English) is nominally the alveolar approximant.

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I am to understand from my own linguistics studies that the Midwest United States standard English phoneme commonly represented by the letter R is, if memory serves, the voiced retroflex alveolar approximant. So, both of what you described.

I'm in my third semester of linguistics, and I only recently heard of it myself, so I guess retroflex Rs aren't really a major part of linguistics in general. As I find myself amongst those people who studied RP in school, but spent most of my free time being exposed to General American, I shift in whether I use alveolar or retroflex depending on what word I'm saying.

More often than not, though, I fall into using a retroflex, as I'm absolutely positive that TV taught me more about english than school ever did, up to University level.

Well, it can be both retroflex and alveolar; "retroflex" means that the tongue loops back to point towards the throat, and "alveolar" is a locative marker--the two are not incompatible. Like, you can theoretically do a voiced retroflex interdental sound (if you have a sufficiently sizable tongue), though whether that produces a unique sound is up for questioning. YOUR STATEMENTS OF USAGE ARE CONFUSING.

What the fuck is going on in this thread? This is interesting stuff and all, but the words "retroflex," "approximant," and various forms of "alveolus" have occurred WAY too often in here. And what of poor little r? Why, it's been flipped upside down, caged, and even... whatever the Hell happened here: ɻ.

I think we're finally starting to get a bit of de-obfuscation in here, though. Which is good.

Also: Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I don't think I pronounce anything by having my tongue double back and wave at my pharynx.

*test* ...well, maybe I do, just a little bit. Huh. Imagine that.

Ah, my mistake. I meant to say that I generally tend to shift between a vocalized R, where I generally have a fairly pronounced retroflective R, or an unvoiced R which comes with speaking some words RP. And then, of course, I make, a lot of times, the many small mistakes that marks me unmistakenly as a swede.

Anyway, I've unfortunantly been out of the loop of linguistics for about a year and a half, went and did my japanese, and while that's no real excuse, I would like to add that I was intending to focus my studies on literature up until I started this semester. Now I'm all for linguistics, which is horrible since I barely passed the test the second semester and I can only barely use the phonetic alphabet and lingo.

And, since I belong to a generation who's never at fault, I blame our teachers for teaching us the alphabet, but never teaching us to use it outside of homework...

*facepalms*

BrainWalker wrote:What the fuck is going on in this thread? This is interesting stuff and all, but the words "retroflex," "approximant," and various forms of "alveolus" have occurred WAY too often in here. And what of poor little r? Why, it's been flipped upside down, caged, and even... whatever the Hell happened here: ɻ.

They're talking about linguistic descriptions of sounds, like what's used for the International Phonetic Alphabet. It's a way of referring to specific sounds without having to refer to specific letters or words, since the sound a letter or word makes varies from language to language, dialect to dialect, and sometimes even person to person. Instead it describes a sound, for consonants at least, by breaking it down into where in the mouth the sound is made (the place of articulation), and how it's made (the manner of articulation). Vowels are described similarly, but for them instead the specific categories are how high and how far back in the mouth they're made. Then you have a small number of consonants that don't neatly fit into the categories made above, but can still at least be categorized using this terminology. By breaking it down this way, every sound that occurs in any language on Earth (and a few that could exist in theory but don't in practice) can be discussed fairly easily by linguists.

Here's a copy of the IPA itself, and each of the terms used is linked to another page so you can see what exactly it means.

PriamNevhausten wrote:Well, it can be both retroflex and alveolar; "retroflex" means that the tongue loops back to point towards the throat, and "alveolar" is a locative marker--the two are not incompatible. Like, you can theoretically do a voiced retroflex interdental sound (if you have a sufficiently sizable tongue), though whether that produces a unique sound is up for questioning. YOUR STATEMENTS OF USAGE ARE CONFUSING.

Retroflex is considered a specific place of articulation in the IPA, with the tip of the tongue between the alveolar ridge and the soft palate. It's little used in English, but gives many people native to the Indian subcontinent their distinct accent when speaking English. It's a place of articulation and not a feature because other places to stick the tip of the tongue with the tongue in a "retroflex" shape are too difficult to have become a place to form a consonant and don't produce any speech sounds that you can't make more comfortably. The sound you seem to be describing would sound enough like the voiceless retroflex fricative ([ʂ]; doesn't exist in English) or maybe the voiceless dental fricative ([θ]; represented by a theta because it's the first sound in the word "theta") to be indistinguishable outside an in-depth analysis.

Spleen wrote:Humorously enough: Dia, my dear, it sounds like you're describing the features of [ɹ] when you describe your pronunciation of /r/, not [ɻ]. My /r/ goes nowhere near the alveolar ridge.

Well, see that bit in my quote where I edited something out? Here's the full quote:
"Also, many Americans realize the phoneme /ɹ/ (often transcribed as /r/) as a retroflex approximant [ɻ]." -- Wiki's page on General American (English).

BrainWalker wrote:What the fuck is going on in this thread? This is interesting stuff and all, but the words "retroflex," "approximant," and various forms of "alveolus" have occurred WAY too often in here. And what of poor little r? Why, it's been flipped upside down, caged, and even... whatever the Hell happened here: ɻ.

Yeah, sorry man. :{ I've been running to Wikipedia for every new word and following every link, cuz Wikipedia sure don't know how to explain stuff in layman terms. Yay for Idran!

BrainWalker wrote:Also: Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I don't think I pronounce anything by having my tongue double back and wave at my pharynx.

*test* ...well, maybe I do, just a little bit. Huh. Imagine that.

I'm pretty sure I don't--it's incredibly uncomfortable, due to that muscle under the tongue that keeps it attached to the bottom of the mouth.

Coincidentally, my brother--who shares my accent-that-is-not-an-accent, had to have that muscle surgically cut at some point in time. I should ask him if people keep asking him what country he's from.

I feel really stupid in this thread. I understand most of what's written when I read it thoroughly, but it would seem that I've been slacking off far too much for comfort in this topic.

Thus, I shall endeavor to improve myself. I'm glad so many here are studying linguistics, or find it interesting. :D

Spleen wrote:Retroflex is considered a specific place of articulation in the IPA, with the tip of the tongue between the alveolar ridge and the soft palate...It's a place of articulation and not a feature because other places to stick the tip of the tongue with the tongue in a "retroflex" shape are too difficult to have become a place to form a consonant and don't produce any speech sounds that you can't make more comfortably.

I'd actually noted that the retroflex indicator wouldn't be likely to produce any significantly different sounds when away from the alveolar ridge, but academically it is possible to use retroflex lingual shape elsewhere and "alveolar" does not necessarily preclude "retroflex" as an additional aspect (but "retroflex" does imply "alveolar," apparently, which is different from what I had originally believed). The linguistics classes I'd attended used both "alveolar" and "retroflex" in describing the sound transcribed as /r/; is the voiced alvoelar glide, transcribed as /l/, also as easily simplified to drop "alveolar" as well?

The thing that's important to know about sounds that sound similar is that there are many languages in which differences we English speakers completely don't notice form completely different phonemes in other languages. For instance, have you ever noticed that before certain vowels at the beginnings of words the way you pronounce your P's is different? There's an extra little puff of air, called an aspiration. Compare it to, for instance, the way you'd pronounce a P when speaking Spanish with the proper accent. No aspiration. In Hindi, you can have two words that have identical sounds - all consonants, all vowels, etc. - except for whether the P is aspirated or unaspirated, and they will have entirely different meanings and be entirely different words. This is a difference between a P pronounced with a nearly-inaudible puff of air and one without, and forms what we call in linguistics a "minimal pair".

So, no?

If there's not a language where a consonant produced with the tongue in the retroflex shape and the same consonant with the tongue not produced in that shape can form a minimal or near-minimal pair, then the difference isn't relevant enough for an IPA chart.

As for /l/: The IPA merged glides and liquids into a group called approximants, probably for that reason.

By the way, I've been working from this chart, which is the one my phonology professor uses: http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/images/pulmonic.gif

Arhar. Damn, I never thought my college education would have obsolete information already.

I learned it as a glide in my intro linguistics class, too. It's probably something that they don't really give you unless you're actually a Ling major.

EDIT: And actually more recently the glide has been brought back in my more advanced phonology class as a good reason why the IPA sometimes blows.

MY FIELD OF STUDY IS KUNFYUZING.