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Re: Rating Languages

From:Dan Sulani <dnsulani@...>
Date:Friday, September 28, 2001, 12:08
On 26 Sept, : David Peterson wrote:

> In a message dated 9/26/01 3:58:05 AM, dnsulani@ZAHAV.NET.IL writes: > > << Most of the time, when I treat this difficulty, > > the client has no problems with the voiceless sounds and needs to be
taught
> > how to produce the voiced equivalents. Although the opposite problem > > (no voiceless sounds) is not unknown to me. >> > > That'd be because voiceless sounds are far less common and harder to > produce. In fact, my phonology professor has argued (with PRAAT data to
back
> it up), that there is, in fact, no [g] in English, but, rather, [k]
without
> aspiration. For instance, he took the [k] in "skum" and removed it and > placed it in front of the syllable "un" and it sounded EXACTLY like "gun". > It was creepy...
That is is! :-) I seem to recall similar feelings back when I was learning about running spectrograph machines to gather speech samples. (that was in the days before everything was computerized! Things could be creepy even under those relatively primitive conditions! :-) ) But regarding my previous posting (quoted above), I was referring to Israeli Hebrew, the language I work in, not English. I was also referring to the phonemic perceptions of Hebrew speakers, where the meaning of words can change depending upon whether a sound is percieved as (what I would call) "voiced" or "unvoiced". People do in fact notice that difference (whatever that difference is on a _phonetic_ level as measured by all kinds of sensitive instruments), even if they can't give a linguistic label to it, and they do seek help if they cannot produced it. Dan Sulani ------------------------------------------------------- likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a. A word is an awesome thing.