Re: Furrin phones in my own lect!

Philip Newton wrote:
> On 3/16/06, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
>
>>words like "huge" and "human" normally have a real [hj] cluster
>>to match my phonemic /hj/,  they likewise occasionally start with [C]
>>instead-
>
>
> I have [C] there, too, and assumed many do -- which is one reason why
> I'm surprised when Americans pronounce German [C] as [k] or [S] --
> after all, they have the phone in their own language! They "just" need
> to get used to pronouncing it in other environments than the ones
> conditioning that phone in their language. (Just as I claim that
> initial [N] is also fairly simple to say, even though [N] doesn't
> occur initially in any of my L1s.)
You'd think so, but one of the harder sounds for me to learn was [k].
Sure, we have it in English, but only as an allophone of /k/ after /s/
in words like "skate" or "scream". Not as hard to learn as ejectives or
clicks, and nowhere near as hard as a uvular trill (which has got to be
the hardest sound to produce in any language for typical English
speakers to learn), but it was easier for me to learn entirely foreign
sounds like [K] and [x]*, compared with the effort of producing a NON-
aspirated initial [k]. (For some reason [t] and [p] were a bit easier to
learn.) I eventually figured out I could get that sound by devoicing an
initial g-.

*[x] currently exists in my pronunciation of "loch" and "Bach", but only
áfter I learned it as a foreign sound.

A slightly more obscure example, my variety of English has a glottal
stop in words like "bitten" and "mountain", and glottal stops between
vowels are easy for me, but it's difficult for me to make a distinction
between words with and without an initial glottal stop. The tendency is
to add a glottal stop before an initial vowel.

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