- cross-posted to:
- linguistics@mander.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- linguistics@mander.xyz
xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech
Alt text:
Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you’re okay.
Sandhi is a real thing. (Source: I had to study this shit to teach pronunciation classes.)
It took me WEEKS to recognize that what I thought I was saying and what noises I was actually making are completely and utterly different. There’s often no relationship (like “coodja” for “could you” or “chrain” for “train”) between the intended sound and the actual sound … but since everybody does it you don’t notice until its forced into your face. The only time you make distinct sounds as per the “official” description (and even then not as often as you think: I submit “train” once again as evidence) is when you’re deliberately speaking slowly and distinctly. Which is almost never (and comes across as condescending in actual interaction).
Weeks, I say again. WEEKS. And this was under constant training that included the playback of what we’d actually said showing us what we were doing. The denial is embedded deeply in our psyche.
I’d say part of this is the intended / official descriptipn isn’t actually that. The spoken word existed first, then someone tried to capture that spoken word using a finite list of characters and character combinations that map back to phenomes. The written word isn’t phonetically accurate to the letters it is composed of, and the written word is just close approximation of the spoken word itself.
That is absolutely correct. Writing isn’t language, in fact. Language is instinctual and barring severe brain damage, everybody on planet Earth learns to communicate in at least once. (Sign languages are language. Indeed they’re an extension of body language.)
Writing is an attempted encoding of language (and not a very good one, given how much is lost in written form vs. in-person communication!) and is a skill that takes a lot of time and effort to learn. Writing is not instinctual in the slightest.
Yeah, as I said my awareness is just “people make fun of my accent some times” (and I make fun right back, it’s that kind of a friend group).