Re: Rating Languages

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.