Re: How to Make Chicken Cacciatore (was: phonetics by guesswork)

En réponse à Mark P. Line :


>NB: I've stopped posting anything about linguistics or natlangs to this
>list, so I've decided to post something about my other hobby besides
>conlangs -- cooking.
>
>
>How to Make Chicken Cacciatore
>==============================
>
[snip great recipe]

Great reply! ;) I couldn't stop laughing for five minutes :))) . But don't 
count on me for ever trying it ;)) .

And now for a few replies directly to Philippe (I deleted his mail too 
qucikly :( ).


>Philippe Caquant said:
> > I knew I shouldn't say that ;-)
> >
Yet you did. Assume :) .

> > Anyway, suppose Germans had 101 ways of pronouncing
> > "Bach" (probably exaggerated ?), then there is no
> > reason to think that Russians haven't also 101 ways of
> > pronouncing "uspex" (success), so the whole discussion
> > is pointless.
It's not, because you describe the "x" in "uspex" in terms of the "ch" in 
Bach. If there are 101 different pronunciations of "ch", how are we 
expected to know which one you meant? And it may be obvious to you, but you 
know both languages. Think of those who don't know Russian, which by the 
way are the main target for a language lesson book :) .

>  I'm pretty sure that if I wandered
> > somewhere is Siberia, or in Altai Mountains, or in
> > Caucasus, I one day shall find an old shepherd (sheep
> > or reindeer shepherd, depending) with a severe throat
> > disease and politically incorrect opinions who will
> > not pronounce "uspex" the way I would expect it.
The problem is that maybe Russian has a single transdialectical way of 
pronuncing "x", but many languages don't. Stop thinking that all languages 
are like French, i.e. essentially linguistic monoliths. The variations in 
languages like English, Spanish or even Dutch are immense, and you don't 
need to travel thousands of kilometers to experience it (indeed, in Dutch 
you're generally at walking distance from at least two or three dialectical 
variations :) , and not small ones. When my friend first once from his 
living place to a place only 18 kilometers further away, it took him a full 
year to begin to understand people speaking their own dialect there! And he 
is normally *extremely* good at dialects). Trying to describe sounds of a 
language in the purpose of teaching it with sounds from those languages is 
thus just stupid, because you have *no* idea which variety of those 
languages the reader is familiar with. The problem is not with the sound of 
the language you try to teach, but with the languages you use as examples. 
And the fact is: it's just too much of a moving target to be any useful, 
unless your target is a very small and precise group of people for whom you 
know *exactly* what other languages and dialects they have been exposed to.

> >
> > (BTW, French would rather pronounce "Bach" as "Bak",
> > at least when talking about Jean-Sebastien, but one
> > should definitely NOT ask a Frenchman how to pronounce
> > German words. Especially if he is an international
> > journalist.)
> >
I hope you've realised that with this sentence, you've just explained 
*exactly* why describing the sounds of a language in terms of the sounds of 
another language is a bad idea in general :) .

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

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