Place and Manner (of Articulation)
February 5th, 2009 | View Comments
In the teachers’ lounge the other day, a kindergarten teacher was sharing stories about her students. One child had proudly gone to the teacher and said, “Ms. ____, Guess what? I can say ‘Hello’ in Chinese!” She expected the child to say: 你好, ni3 hao3. Imagine her surprise when the child uttered the phrase, “Herro!”
Looking at an IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) chart, the terms on the top are given to each sound based on where the sound is produced, starting from the lips and ending at the glottis. The terms on the left indicate how the sound is created.
Nasal: air is pushed into the nasal cavity where it resonates
Plosive: air is fully stopped and released
Fricative: air is mostly stopped, but some passes through
Approximant: air is blocked by the tongue, but is able to escape around it (/r/* and /l/* sounds)
Trill: the tongue rapidly flaps (think Spanish rolled Rs)
Flap: the tongue flaps once (ie. “butter” pronounced as “budder”)
The stereotypical Asian “accent”, with the mixing of the letters r and l, comes from the phonemic inventory on these languages. (Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound in a language.) In English, we have two approximants, an /r/ and an /l/. In Chinese, there is only one. Hence the stereotypical accent in which food service workers ask if you’ve ordered “Polk flied lice.”
*Linguistic convention writes phonemes as such. So the b sound in “baby” would be written as /b/.
Peter posted this on February 5th, 2009 @ 3:12pm in Culture Gaps, Pronunciation | Permalink to "Place and Manner (of Articulation)"
American-born Taiwanese girl who married a Japanese guy. And who forgot about six years' of Spanish grammar and most of the vocab.
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The existence of a stereotypical Asian “accent” has more to do with people not being to tell Asians apart and less to do with the actual languages. It also has a lot to do with how an English-speaking brain classifies sounds that don’t actually exist in English.
We may not have an /r/ in Chinese, but we do have something that is pretty much an /l/. Thus, a heavy-accented Chinese speaker is not really going to say “flied lice”. S/he is more likely going to say “fwiced wice”.
In Japanese, there is only one phoneme that is a mash of /r/ and /l/. The Japanese r is pronounced much like a Spanish r, which sounds kind of like /d/, which English speakers are more likely to hear as an /l/ than /r/. Thus, a heavy-accented Japanese speaker might actually say something that, to an English speaker, sounds like “flied lice”.
I’ll let Elenita fill us in on Korean phonemes.
Ah, phonemes. Korean ones definitely deserve a post or two of their own, given how articulation of vowels can vary tremendously depending on any given morphology (i.e., word formation). But, for now…
To complicate matters right off the bat, Korean doesn’t have an /f/ sound–people usually “replace” it with a cross between an English /b/ or /p/. But, like Chinese, Korean definitely has an /l/ sound. We also have a trilled-r sound, like in Spanish. To confuse people learning the language, the latter two are both represented by the same letter: ㄹ. The catch is that native Korean speakers know that the ㄹ-sound in 라면 (rameoyn*, as in the noodle, pronounced with a trilled r) and 빠리 (ppali, meaning fast, pronounced /l/) are different phonemes, but mostly shrug if you ask why an ostensibly phonetic alphabet doesn’t distinguish between the two.
The real issue for pronunciation, however, arises because Korean doesn’t have phonemes with multiple consonants: multiple consonants are always separated by one or more vowels–or they are split into different syllables with a glottal stop. You can’t have a consonant unattached to a vowel, either, which leads many people to unconsciously attach the vowel ㅡ (romanized as “eu”, but unfortunately doesn’t really exist in English). For example, there is no such sound as the “sk” in skiing or desk. That sound is split into its two consonant parts, meaning that a Korean person might pronounce those words as:
스키잉 s(eu)’ ki’ ing
댓크 des’ k(eu) or even de’ s(eu)’ k(eu).
Fried rice might therefore be pronounced as:
p(eu)’ rie’ d(eu) ri’ c(eu) (because, remember, the e in rice is silent.)
Mispronunciation of the English R? Sure. But I think English speakers would be more taken aback by the additional vowels in there than the mangling of the /r/. In fact, the /p/ might confuse people even more.
* Yes, I know that it’s spelled differently on your typical package of malnutritious undergraduate fare. I’ve decided to stick with Revised Romanization here at Chipanglish, mostly because it lacks diacritics by design. (Don’t get me wrong: diacritics are awesome and I love them, but they add another layer of complication to posting when switching keyboard layouts midstream already messes enough with my brain.) The fact that it’s officially used by the South Korean government doesn’t hurt either.
Which reminds me.
In Chinese we definitely have an /f/ sound. “Fwied wice” is probably still the best approximation of a Chinese accent in that case.
In Japanese, the f sound is more heavily aspirated, with the upper teeth barely touching the lower lip, like a cross between /f/ and /h/. Japanese also has that characteristic that each consonant is immediately followed by a vowel. So a heavy Japanese accent would really produce something more like “fu-di-e-do di-su”.
Which doesn’t actually sound like “flied lice”.
We actually have an r-like consonant in Chinese, that would be spelled more like “rzh” as in the word, 日, ri4, “day”. As for the corresponding International Phonetic Alphabet classification, my best guess is that it’s a voiced coronal lateral fricative.
Right. But that just reinforces my point: the existence of the stereotypical “Asian accent” that involves mixing r’s and l’s comes primarily from ignorance about the languages.