--- Tim May <butsuri@...> wrote:
> Gary Shannon wrote at 2004-04-09 18:02:14 (-0700)
<snip>
> > Two people walk into a restaurant. One orders
> "frahd chikin pleez"
> > and the other orders "vroit jigun pliss" and the
> both get the same
> > meal delivered to their table. The power of
> language lies in the
> > fact that nuances of mouth noises are utterly
> irrelevant, so why
> > are so many people seemingly obsessed with
> something so irrelevant?
<snip>
> Pronunciation nearly irrelevant to communication?
> Obviously untrue.
> Pronunciation is the _only_ thing distinguishing one
> utterance - out
> of context - from another. If your restaurant-goers
> had pronounced
> their order as "The president of Chile has been
> assassinated" then
> they would hardly have been understood. But there
> is no difference
> other than the sequence of sounds produced by the
> speaker.
Granted. But I was really wondering about the endless
discussions over differences that do NOT matter.
Certainly there are differences that are far enough
from the norm that they lose all meaning, and
differences so far from the norm that they take on
completely different meanings. But that's a whole
different subject.
It seems to me that it is sufficient for any given
language to define the range of acceptable phonetic
values for a given meaning and leave it at that. I
doubt anyone would mistake my meaning if I talked
about Captain Kirk's run in with "Tlingon high
command." In English "Klingon" and "Tlingon" are
interchangable.
What brought this whole thing on for me was a week
recently spent with some people from Poland. Their
English was excellent but their pronunciation and they
way that placed accents on different sylables took a
little getting used to. But once I go used to it they
were perfectly understandable. Thus the differences
were irrelevant.
Personally, in my own conlangs I always make a special
point of the fact that there is no standard
pronunciation for a given word, only a wide range of
acceptable pronunciations. Seems to me that's how a
conglang should be. Otherwise it becomes too hard to
learn to speak it "correctly".
--gary