Since a lot of Monty Python references flew over my head in those days I just shrugged it off like the others. ![]() At the time I had no idea what “Ling my berr” was supposed to mean, or why they said it. … this is just a paraphrased memory, look up the sketch if you want to see the actual dialogue. Someone rings a bicycle bell, and an Asian stereotype says There is a Monty Python sketch that is so weird and racist in this one particular way that I didn’t get it for the first … oh, maybe 10 years after I first saw it. The paper argues that it is in fact, all in our head, and then it goes into some fairly arcane arguments for why the computational system of linguistic sound is arbitrary and not really related to actual pronunciation, and that R sounds are an especially good example of this arbitrariness since they are especially prone to variation. Tl dr: There is a kind of psychological unity across languages concerning so-called rhotics, or ‘r-sounds.’ As touched on in the video, there is enormous variation between various members of that class, so while everyone agrees there is a psychological reality, there, no one really knows if it is articulatory or acoustic or what. One question some linguists like to ask is, what is the relationship between those mental objects and the physical ones that vibrate through the air? The paper is an investigation of that question via r sounds across different languages. As you don’t have any blue wave-lengths of light in your head, but can still conjure up an idea of what blue is and means to you, so we don’t actually have the physical objects of sound in our heads. The objects we hear when someone speaks (or see when someone signs) are not what we actually have in our heads. I got it from MetaFilter, where user os tuberoes (Alex Chabot) links to his Glossa paper What’s wrong with being a rhotic?, which is also well worth your while here’s his MeFi summary: The video has linguists and vocal tracts and everything I can’t recommend it highly enough. ![]() ![]() This is brilliant, because it immediately puts English-speakers on the wrong foot and makes them see how hard it is to recognize and reproduce distinctions that your native language doesn’t make. In this episode of Vox Observatory, we take a look at each language and how it affects pronunciation for English-language learners.īut it doesn’t start out with L/R, it starts out with Cantonese tones: if you don’t say wai faai bat po ‘only speed is unbreakable’ right, it sounds like you’re talking about wi-fi (thus giving birth to a Cantonese meme). However, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese are completely different languages that each handle L-sound and R-sounds differently. But American movies and TV shows have applied this linguistic stereotype to Korean and Chinese characters too, like Kim Jong Il in Team America: World Police, or Chinese restaurant employees singing “fa ra ra ra ra” in A Christmas Story. It’s so well-known that American soldiers in World War II reportedly used codewords like “lallapalooza” to distinguish Japanese spies from Chinese allies. Joss Fong, who describes herself as a “tragically monolingual producer,” presents a splendid video which she describes as follows:Ī foreign accent is when someone speaks a second language with the rules of their first language, and one of the most persistent and well-studied foreign-accent features is a lack of L/R contrast among native Japanese speakers learning English.
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