Dear PhoNet Members
I'd like to invite you all to take part in the
following game – just to explore the opportunity of having so many speakers
of different languages gathered together. Could you please choose and describe
up to three phonetic phenomena found in your native language (accent) that
strike you as peculiar to it, particularly interesting from the general
linguistic point of view, or likely to be the cause of acute problems for a
foreign learner? I'm going to cover three such features of Polish: the
fricative/affricate series, complex consonant clusters, and the phonetic
interpretation of Polish digraphs and diacritics – probably in three
different postings. If you read them with care and do some elementary practice,
you should be able to impress your friends and families with your fluent Polish
pronunciation.
Piotr Gąsiorowski