Saturday 31 March 2012

Chinese tones and English vowels

It had always baffled me why so many Western students of Chinese simply cannot tell the difference between Chinese tones (just to name one aspect of the Chinese language), which makes them come up with the totally wrong interpretation of the message.  
I have now thought of the English equivalent for non-English speakers:  the English long vowel and short vowel, which a lot of speakers of Chinese and some, if not all, European languages just cannot distinguish.
Examples:

--> People will say “sheeps”, and get corrected (“no s for plural sheep”), when it is “ships” they meant to say.

--> One French girl was losing at a croquet game in a posh-neighbourhood garden in Surrey, and protested loudly, “You can’t!  You can’t!!”  Except that she uttered the short vowel version — spelt with "u" instead of "a" — of (the British pronunciation of) “can’t”, thus rendering it into a four-letter swear word.

--> One French woman said she had a farm wedding, with a tractor loaded with hay and her beloved grandmother’s “sh*t” on the hay.  She’d meant the long vowel version: sheet (as in bedsheet).

2 comments:

  1. As a non-native speaker, I can say I can tell the difference, but it doesn't always come natural to say it right. I often have to make a deliberate effort at pronouncing it the right way, so for example I am always extra careful when I have to pronounce "sheet".

    I think something similar (apparently hard for non-native speakers but obvious to the natives) happens for the double consonants in Italian. For example pala (=shovel) and palla (=ball) are pronounced quite differently and no Italian could mistake one for the other.

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  2. My first encounter with the double consonant in Italian is the word dottore when I was typesetting an Italian PhD student's dissertation. Japanese has double consonants, too: e.g., kata = direction; katta = to have bought. As you say, no native-speaker of the language can get the distinction wrong, yet it is quite difficult for someone whose own language doesn't have that phenomenon.

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