Re: [tied] Dnghu.org and "Modern" Indo-European

From: Edgard Bikelis
Message: 49120
Date: 2007-06-23

It's curious the way our perception is sometimes influenced by our native language, and sometimes not at all: Portuguese is my native language, without any aspirate stop, and I still can recognize aspiration and voice, for instance; but the difference between /T/ and /f/ or /s/ was very tricky to learn, and just last week, after two years or so of persistence, I finally managed to start a word with a glottal stop. Until then glottal stop was just IPA's fiction ; ). In a way phonemes different by just one trace, voice in this case, are indeed subtle to distinguish... I find it amusing to think your 'ears' are akin to the ancient greek ones, even if not so accurate an idea...

Edgard

On 6/22/07, Andrew Jarrette <anjarrette@...> wrote:
 
(...)

Regarding the voiced aspirates, they take a bit of getting use to,
but they're still used in several Indian languages. Also, English has
voiceless aspirated stops when at the very start of a syllable, right
next to a vowel; compare the words "car" and "scar", and you'll hear
a difference.
I know all about the voiceless aspirates in English; that's a very well-known phenomenon.  It's relatively easy to produce voiceless aspirates because they are stops followed by breath without voice, after which the voice begins and thus a vowel follows.  The breath is equivalent to a voiceless vowel (like /h/).  But voiced aspirates are stops followed by breath plus voice; this is therefore equivalent to a vowel in my view, and thus I don't see how it is possible to distinguish voiced stop + voiced breathing from voiced stop + vowel.  But nevertheless they are used in many Indian languages, so the difference exists.  I have listened to recordings of Hindi many times ("teach yourself" - type tapes) where a speaker first pronounces a word with a voiced unaspirated stop, then pronounces a similar word with a voiced aspirated stop, to show the difference.  I have to confess that to this day I am still unable to hear the difference between simple voiced stops and voiced aspirated stops.  I think you have to be born into a language that distinguishes them to be able to successfully distinguish them.  Then again, I'm sure many English and other European speakers have learned to produce and recognize the voiced aspirated stops of Hindi; kudos to them, because I really find them very difficult to distinguish from regular voiced stops, and I don't think I am at all unusual in this respect, for a speaker of a European language.
 
Andrew
I know_._,_.___
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