Chinglish

[David A. Daniel]

-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Herb Stahlke
Sent: Monday, August 25, 2008 10:19 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Chinglish


>We may simply speak different dialects.

This is the crux of the whole issue, of course, and why any attempt to
respell English phonetically is ludicrous: whose phonetics you gonna use?
Even if you think you're basing your phonetics on something public, common
and "standard" - like a dictionary pronunciation - even the way you HEAR it
is going to be different from what someone else hears. As we have seen in
this thread - some hear a rhyme one way, some hear it another, and some
don't hear a rhyme at all.

I don't think I can hear a difference in the vowel sound when I say ching
and cheese. Paying attention, though, I do know absolutely that my tongue is
not in the same place or shape for the two sounds. So that may well mean
that someone on the receiving end of my utterance is hearing two different
sounds that even I, the speaker, can not differentiate. (Maybe I could
differentiate at one time, like when I was a kid? Why else would my tongue
be in different places and shapes if at some point I was not distinguishing
two sounds?)

TZ doesn't think he is transcribing his own dialect; he thinks he is
transcribing from a standardized source. Aside from the obvious that that
source is not standard for everybody (or perhaps even for anybody), what he
doesn't understand, or maybe even believe possible, is that folks are
hearing that same source differently. Often how you hear something depends
on how you say it. As an experiment, I just now had my Texan friend listen
to the word "tire" on m-w.com and asked him about the pronunciation. He
said, "Yep, that's right: tar." QED. Maybe I'll experiment some more with
this...
DAD

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