Re: Mandarin aspirated and unaspirated initials

En réponse à "Freedberg, Bruce" <Bruce.Freedberg@...>:

>
> Does the redundancy of features mean that native Mandarin speakers are
> not
> going to have much trouble understanding what sound I am trying for, or
> are
> they just being polite when they assure me that they understand what
> they're
> hearing?
The point here is that Mandarin speakers distinguish stops based on aspiration,
but are unaware (at least consciously) of voice distinctions. So if you
consistently pronounce the unaspirated stops voiced and the aspirated stops
voiceless, they won't have problems recognising the words, because the
aspiration feature is there to distinguish the two sets of sounds. They won't
recognise that you voice your unaspirated stops, and they probably think you
speak with an accent, but unless they know what voicing is they won't be able
to explain what is wrong in your accent. On the other hand, French just doesn't
have aspiration at all, and all its stops are unaspirated, whether voiced or
voiceless. That's the reason why Mandarin speakers have difficulties
distinguishing the two sets of stops of French: they are distinguished by a
feature that Mandarin speakers are not trained to recognise, a feature which is
not phonemic in their language.

  (note: I don't seem to have any trouble distinguishing the
> two
> sets of sounds, which seems odd given how much trouble I have in
> consistently pronouncing them).
>
That's not unusual. I myself can recognise many more sounds than I can
pronounce (for instance the laryngeal consonants of Arabic, which I can
recognise but cannot imitate :( ). The ears are easier to train than the
mouth :)) . I find that perfectly normal that it's more difficult to train your
vocal apparatus to pronounce foreign sounds than your ear to recognise foreign
sounds.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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