Re: Accent

[Robin Turner <robin@xxxxxxx.xxx.xxx]

la silvEn.oklEr. cusku di'e

> I want to add that one of the games when we encounter a new face at an
> international Esperanto meeting is trying to guess which country our new
> acquaintance comes from, hearing his/her accent. It's not simply a matter
> of sounds lacking in one or another language. There is an /k/ sound in
> French, in English, in German and in Dutch, but it's not _exactly_ the
> same... And it is very difficult for most English speakers to pronouce
> _clear_ vowels, as the ones in lojban.

Hence the need for a _range_ of acceptable pronunciation (as I pointed out in
my mangled Lojban posting). I've noticed, actually, that English speakers are
perfectly capable of pronouncing clear vowels, but we just get lazy about it -
the same applies to such features as British English speakers dropping the
final "-r" or American English speakers changing "t" to "d". You really
notice it when a foreign word crops up in English conversation; for example,
most English speakers can pronounce the Turkish farewell "güle güle" fine,
except when they say it in the middle of an English conversation, when it
comes out something like "gooley gooley".

si'a la and. cusku di'e

> Somebody could speak Lojban with improper pronounciation and stress. I
> have a difficult time pronouncing "xekri". Maybe an Arab would find that
> easy.
>
> The Japanese cannot distinguish spoken "r" and "l", because they don't
> have "l". Lojban does, so we know a native Lojban speaker wouldn't have
> this difficulty.
>

Well, you can't please everybody, or you'd end up with an incredibly
impoverished phoneme bank. I've aleady given y comments on Lojban {x}.
AFAIK Japanese (and maybe Cantonese, but the other way round) are the only
people with the r/l problem, which they would encounter learning just about
any foreign language. Interestingly, Japanese students of English can learn
to pronounce "l" and "r" distinctly, but still have problems _hearing_ the
difference - I spent a whole summer school being called "Lobin".

co'o mi'e robin.