Chinglish

[LanDi Liu]

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 10:37 PM, David A. Daniel <dad at pokerwiz.com> wrote:
> Herb Stahlke
>>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?

CHINESE!  (A lame attempt at getting back on topic)

> 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?)

Some people can hear things like vowel quality better than others.  I
haven't got any degrees in linguistics (they're in music), so I can't
say how much ear training is involved, but I'm under the impression
that it is minimal, if at all.

But that's why we have things like Praat, and formant analysis.

--
Randy Alexander
Jilin City, China
My Manchu studies blog:
http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu

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