Re: THEORY: language and the brain [Interesting article]

En réponse à Chris Bates :

>Its pretty bad! Lets list the faults: Irregular stress (is that a
>problem for people whose L1 has regular stress, Christophe? anyone?)
It is a problem at least for French speakers. Most of them never manage to
get the stress right (if they even hear it. Since stress is not distinctive
in French, we tend to overlook it in other languages, and English teachers
tend to forget to teach us about it :(( . Personally, I'm lucky I got
Spanish classes where the teacher taught us a lot about the position of the
stress in Spanish. This allowed me to accustom my ears to pay attention to
stress, and allowed me to discover where English stressed its words. I
often still get the stress wrong though :((( ).

>  A
>massive number of vowel sounds (although less than some of the other
>Germanic Languages I think) which must be pretty hard to master for
>someone whose L1 has the more normal 3 - 5 ish vowel system.
I don't think the number of vowels is the problem. The problem is more the
quality of those vowels. For instance, for French people /&/ (that's
supposed to be the ae-ligature) and /V/ are very difficult to recognise (it
took me years to recognise them). /I/ and /U/ are also problematic (it took
me more than ten years to realise /I/ was different from /i/ - until then I
wondered why English dictionaries used this symbol in their phonetic
descriptions -, and I still don't know which words have /u/ and which words
have /U/ - is "book" /buk/ or /bUk/ for instance? I still don't know! -).

>  Quite a few
>consonant clusters which must be pretty hard if you have an L1 which is
>mostly CVCV... like Japanese for instance (although nowhere near as bad
>as Georgian I agree). Quite a large number of consonants as well
>compared to some languages, the most difficult to learn are probably T
>and D by people whose L1 doesn't contain them admittedly.
They are indeed quite difficult for French speakers, who usually replace
them by /s/ and /z/. The 'r' is also a problem.

And since the French system of education is not very good at foreign
languages, the result is that after 10 years of English classes, most
French people are unable to pronounce even two meaningful words in the
language (and can't understand even one!).

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

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