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

Its pretty bad! Lets list the faults: Irregular stress (is that a
problem for people whose L1 has regular stress, Christophe? anyone?) 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. 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. I remember
once I was in France with a girl called fritha... her name was
unpronouncable to everyone except the local school english teacher.
 Although when you think of it esperanto is as bad if we're looking at
phonology... I don't think I'd try to design the next international
language even if I wanted to be an auxlanger because to be honest making
a language which is easy to use takes all the fun out of it.

>Quoting Chris Bates <christopher.bates@...>:
>
>
>
>>I've been thinking about it and I've found more examples of
>>contrasting
>>s and z than I expected, but I still think its a less important
>>distinction than pronouncing T different from f and t, and D different
>>from d or v. I'm often amazed that people can learn to speak english
>>as
>>well as they can, thinking of the number of new sounds speakers of
>>some
>>languages have to learn to distinguish. I think that english is
>>probably
>>very badly chosen as an international language given the large number
>>of
>>sounds it uses... I'm not sure what would be as acceptable and better
>>though (after all, most people like english because they, or their
>>teachers, think it will be useful for business purposes).
>>
>>
>
>I think the first thing English needs is a human-readable orthography! :-)
>
>But English's phonemic inventory isn't to terrible, is it? Sure, it's got [T]
>and [D], and a messy vowel system, but it could be so much worse. It could've
>had a couple dozen clicks, or full series of velarized and palatalized
>consonants, four-way voicing and aspiration contrasts, or umpteen distinctive
>contour tones with massive tone sandhi. Or all of that combined with Georgioid
>consonant clusters and full complements of nasalized and creaky-voiced vowels.
>And phonemic voiceless nasals.
>
>                                                              Andreas
>
>
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