Re: Obsessed with Mouth Noises

There are a lot of assumptions you've made that you might not realize you've made
here.  So let's go through all this:
Gary wrote:
<<Granted, pronunciation can be interesting, but I'llnever understand the seeming
obsession with trivialnuances that seems to grip some linguists.Pronunciation
is nearly irrelevant when it comes tofulfilling the primary purpose of
language;communication.>>
Assumption Number 1: If language is only a tool for communication, then all linguists
should be concerned with, with respect to phonetics, is whether or not person A
can communicate with person B.  Or possibly: All phoneticians are interested
with are dialectal differences which have no bearing on communication.  Both
of these are, of course, completely untrue.  Leaving production problems aside
(i.e., people that have to work with a speech pathologist in order to be able
to produce recognizable sounds), one of the main things phoneticians do with
their studies is make predictions.  These predictions can be predictions about
why a certain sound change occurred, which ones are more likely to occur, what
distinctions are unstable, etc.  Why do all this?  Well, for example, at one
point in time, German speakers and English speakers spoke the same language.
 Now they don't.  Part of this has to do with syntax, morphology, etc., but a
lot also has to do with sound changes.  The w!
 ay we learn about sound changes is studying dialect variation that's occurring
right now.  After all, different dialects can eventually grow into different
languages.  Now, whether or not this whole realm of study is frivolous is not
something that can really be argued, because that could lead to a whole
discussion of, "Well, if you think *that's* frivolous, then what about this?"
<<Two people walk into a restaurant.  One orders "frahdchikin pleez" and the other
orders "vroit jigun pliss"and the both get the same meal delivered to
theirtable.>>
Let's assume your right about this.  We can extend this to syntax and general
grammar.  A propose that a conlang should have no fixed grammar, but merely a
wide range of acceptable variants.  After all, you can say "He went to the
store", or "He go store", and they're both perfectly understandable to a native
English speaker.  So why impose arbitrary rules such as tense, prepositions,
articles, etc.?  If you do that, it becomes too hard to speak "correctly".
One thing that the example I gave above and your example have in common is that
they're hard to screw up.  If you have an idea of how the language is supposed
to sound, you'll get it somewhat right (i.e., you won't say "The to went store
he", or [vli:t s@idZo~ BjejS] ="fried chicken please").  What about little
differences, though?  So, the stereotypical Hindi speaker who speaks English
overgeneralizes the progressive, so they say things like, "I am thinking that's
not such a good idea."  So, one thing such a speaker might say is, "I am
seeing him."  Does that mean they're dating him, or that they can see him?
 Presumably they also know the expression "to be seeing someone" (after all,
we're dealing with fluent speakers who just have a different way of speaking,
not language-learners).  So which is it?  Same thing with pronunciation.  I
can't think of any examples off hand, but one problem that my grandmother has
is she can't distinguish [I] and [i].  So both "seat" and "sit!
 " are pronounced [sit].  I can tell you from experience that there are times
that I've genuinely been confused about what she was talking about, and the
only reason was pronunciation.  Now, the difference between [i] and [I] is,
quite frankly, really just a nuance of the mouth.  The sounds are *so* close
that they're indistinguishable in most languages.  They are distinguished in
English, though, so this little nuance of the mouth isn't simply a nuance.
Also, why is it that you've only focused on seemingly non-native speakers?  Native
speakers have varying pronunciations, and studying the variance can tell you a
lot about the history of the language, and where the language is going.  I
attended an interesting talk last year, in fact, about how there's a kind of
vowel harmony developing in Scots English.  Did I have trouble understanding
them?  No.  Is it important to communication?  No.  Is it, therefore,
uninteresting, and a waste of time to study?  If you say "yes", then I'd
really like to hear why.  It's a linguistic phenomenon, and linguists study
linguistic phenomenon.  From a conlanging point of view, it's something that
happens in real language, so if you want to make a realistic conlang, you
should keep it in mind.
But I think your main point is that there's no point in specifying, in a conlang,
that X sound needs to pronounce exactly thus, and Y vowel needs to be
pronounced in just this way.  Fair enough.  But why do they do it real
grammars of real languages?  Should it be considered unimportant?  After all,
one of the things that every good grammar will say right off the bat is what
dialect they describe, and all the particulars in the grammar will be
understood to be specific only to that dialect.  Would you say that they
should do something else?  Maybe say, "In X language, you can kind of
pronounce this vowel like this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this,
and this, depending on where you are."  Maybe if the point was to help you be
understood in that language, that would be fine, but if the point is to
describe the language, then it would be totally irresponsible.
<<It seems to me that it is sufficient for any givenlanguage to define the range of
acceptable phoneticvalues for a given meaning and leave it at that.>>
Back to conlanging, let's consider this point.  If you intend your conlang to be
spoken by actual people, then, yes, maybe you might do this.  In fact, this is
exactly the kind of thing they talk about on Auxlang.  When I learned
Esperanto, for example, we were told how all the sounds should be pronounced,
and encouraged to not pronounce them in an English-like manner.  In fact, for
every language I've ever learned this has been the case.  The reason is that
the not-100%-Esperanto-way of pronouncing, for example, /t/ in the U.S.
(alveolar, aspirated), will be different from the not-100%-Esperanto-way of
pronouncing /t/ in India (I'd guess that the latter'd be dental, unaspirated?).
 Then when you consider complicated letters like /l/ and /r/, pretty soon you
could imagine people not being able to understand one another.  Unless you're
creating an IAL, though, you're probably imagining a conlanging audience, and
so you can get away with giving a range of pronunciations for a !
 given sound.
So that's for a language one intends to be spoken.  None of my conlangs (with
the exception of maybe Kele), however, are supposed to be spoken languages.  I
mean, they could be, but I'm not going out trying to recruit speakers.  So I
really don't care how people pronounce, or what pronunciations would be
acceptable and what wouldn't.  What I'm doing is describing a dialect.  (In
my cases, I don't have concultures, so they're not dialects from particular
groups, but any description will be of a dialect.)  The intent is that this is
the way that some people would or could pronounce that language.  If I were to
make a TY book, then I would include information about how a given sound could
be pronounced (isn't that what they do, anyway?  "The dotless i in Turkish
sounds a little bit like the 'u' in 'could', but less round"), and the goal
would be for a native speaker to simply understand.  But that's not what my
conlang descriptions are.  As for how a native speaker of another l!
 anguage would pronounce these sounds, while kind of interesting, why devote
any time to it?  After all, it's pretty formulaic.  Like you said here:
<<TheirEnglish was excellent but their pronunciation and theyway that placed accents on
different sylables took alittle getting used to.  But once I go used to it
theywere perfectly understandable.>>
The reason you could get used to their pronunciation was because it was
systematic.  To figure out how a native speaker of another language would
pronounce a conlang would be a simple matter of creating a formula: This sound
will be pronounced like this, this one like that, this one like that...
 Further, if you consider all the languages in the world, you could probably
get every sound having twenty different variants--maybe more.  Would you want
to include all these in a description?  Perhaps a separate page devoted to
each natural and created language?  How a native Esperanto/American
English/British
English/Mandarin/Spanish/Italian/Japanese/Hawaiian/Russian/Tagalog, etc.
speaker would pronounce X language.  I don't see why this would be even
desirable--by anybody.
Also, consider you're notion of a nuance of the mouth.  You're claim is that a
native English speaker can understand anyone who speaks with an accent.  This
isn't controversial: We all can do it (after all, we *all* speak with an
accent).  You say, then, that since this is the case, such phonetics shouldn't
be studied.  But notice: Don't you find it interesting that we *can* do this?
 When listening to a person speaking with an accent, it can sound either odd
or unintelligible at first, but after awhile, we "get used to it".  Something
allows us to adjust to understand them, and to do so *very* quickly.  How the
heck do we do that?  What would be too jumbled to adjust to?  And further, if
you got somebody with a really thick accent (doesn't matter what), and told a
native English speaker that this person spoke no English at all, would the
native English speaker still be able to make the adjustment, since they expect
this person to be speaking another language?  These, to me,!
 are all fascinating questions, and they're dealt with by phoneticians, and all
of them have to do with what you've referred to as nuances.
So that's partly why I think nuances are interesting and relevant.  Does this
address your concern, or did you mean something slightly different?  (I know
it's easy to misunderstand intention over the internet: I've done it tons of
times, and I know I'll do it again.)
-David*******************************************************************"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze.""No eternal reward will forgive
us now for wasting the dawn."
-Jim Morrison
http://dedalvs.free.fr/

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