Chinglish

Tom Zurinskas truespel at HOTMAIL.COM
Thu Aug 28 00:57:11 UTC 2008


I would like to trust the numbers to identify vowels.  I've played with Praat (I assume the "aa" is pronuounced "ah" like "Saab" (foespeld ~aa in truespel).  I'm not practiced at it but I find it hard to determine vowel identity by numbers or wave forms.  If this is possible with practice, it would be a good thing, taking human bias and variability out of the equation.

Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+
See truespel.com - and the 4 truespel books plus "Occasional Poems" at authorhouse.com.

> Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 01:16:55 +0800
> From: strangeguitars at GMAIL.COM
> Subject: Re: Chinglish
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: LanDi Liu
> Subject: Re: Chinglish
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 10:37 PM, David A. Daniel  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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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