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[lojban-beginners] Re: pronunciation
On Jun 20, 2006, at 7:39 PM, Chris Capel wrote:
On 5/31/06, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm not sure stress will be the worst thing to worry Japanese
speakers
though, given the consonant clusters Lojban has. Lojban was not
designed
to be particularly easy to pronounce.
When I was in grade school, it took me a week or two of speech therapy
to learn to pronounce the American "r" sound. Several years ago, it
took me (an American) about a year to really learn to easily pronounce
a Spanish "r". (A trill between the tip of the tongue and the back of
the front teeth.) A few months ago, it took me about two days to learn
the French "r", which is a uvular trill. (I'm not sure if the uvula is
actually flapping around, or what.) It could be that the latter is
easier to learn, or maybe I'm just better at producing strange sounds
nowadays.
My preferred way to learn a new sound is to look at an IPA table, and
find a sound in the same column as the one I want to learn that I
already know and work from it. Wikipedia has a table at http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:IPA_chart_2005.png For example, when I
was learning the sound represented by a l with a circle (phi, maybe
but it depends on font) which is the German V, I started with the
beta sound which is more or less the V sound in Spanish and unvoiced
it. For the french R (which I think is a voiced uvular fricative,
represented by the upside-down capital R), I would the uvular
unvoiced fricative (curvy upper case X) and voice it since I am
familiar with it.
Unfortunately, the other half of this is that I spend & have spent a
lot of time getting to know the shape of my mouth in different
positions so this doesn't work for everyone. The other thing is to
listen to a recording of the sounds, and try to copy them. Between
myself and some other Lojbanists, I'm sure we can pull together a
recording of just about any sound you need. (Although mine will
probably have background noise since our roof and gutters are being
re-done, which is hardly quiet) Also, the University of Iowa has a
flash page illustrating American English, German, and Spanish, which
should cover the needed sounds for Lojban at http://www.uiowa.edu/%
7Eacadtech/phonetics/ and some of the acceptable variants.
Do native Japanese and Chinese speakers learning to produce the "l"
sound always have a lot of trouble? Is there some technique that can
help them to consistently learn it?
There seems to be a common misconception that Chinese and Japanese
speakers sound the same when they (mis)pronounce English because of
their native language. I don't know much Japanese, but a friend of
mine who has studied to near fluency tells me that their /r/ is in
between the /l/ and /r/ sounds in English. Unlike this, Chinese
(which I have studied) has two different sounds for /r/ and /l/. The /
l/ is almost like English. The /r/ is a little tricky to describe;
it's like trying to say Lojban's {r} and {j} at the same time. I
think it's the upside down small r in IPA, which is a voiced alveolar
approximant.
I don't think that this phoneme would actually be the hardest part of
Lojban for either of Japanese or Chinese speakers -- pronouncing a
syllable that ends in a consonant would be. In both languages, the
only sound allowed at the end of a syllable is /n/ or a vowel (some
Chinese dialects allow consonants, and Cantonese does). So all cmene
would be nearly as hard for them as the tones of Chinese are for an
English speaker. (In this way, the two accents for English do sound
the same; both a Japanese speaker and Chinese speaker will tend to
swallow consonants at the ends of syllables.)
Are there any consonant clusters in Lojban that commonly give English
speakers trouble?
I would bet {ml} as in {mlatu} does, as well as {jr} as in {bajra}
and {kt} from {cukta}. These types of pairs aren't allowed in
English, so they're a tricky to wrap the tongue around.
It always surprised me that Lojban had two different liquids ("l" and
"r"), given that they're so close and that some languages (IIRC,
including Japanese) make all liquid sounds allophones. I wonder
whether some other consonant would have been better. Now, Lojban's "r"
can be pronunced as an alveolar flap or trill, or a uvular trill or
frictive, (or a few other things that I can't decipher the ASCII IPA
for,) which probably makes it somewhat easier to understand for
Japanese native speakers.
Chris Capel
--
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
-- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)
Really, there isn't a magic secret to learning new sounds. It helps
to practice a lot, especially the kind of practice that makes you
feel like an idiot where you just say the sounds over and over.
Learning some of the technical aspects can help you place the sounds
more accurately. This is the aspect of language learning that is
really best when you have a native speaker to talk back and forth
with who can correct you in person.
mu'o mi'e .aleks.