Phoning abroad
Phoning Abroad
or
Or, Swedish pronunciation for the unreasonably geeky
[ Part 0 ]
Some people think that the best way to the best way to learn to speak a foreign language is to go to a country where it is spoken and immerse yourself in all that yummy foreign goodness.
Others think that that's often impractical, but that you can do almost as well by imitating native speakers on cassette courses.
And then there's those people for whom life is just one big box marked "Other (please state)". Regular readers won't need to be told that I'm One Of Those People.
I'm in good company, though; today's Special Guest Star is Henry Sweet who will be reading from his book, The Practical Study of Languages (1897). Take it away Henry:
The efficient teaching of phonetics is impeded by two popular fallacies.Fallacy of Imitation
The first of these is that pronounciation can be learnt by mere imitation. This is as if fencing could be learnt by looking on at other people fencing. The movements of the tongue in speaking are even quicker and more complicated than those of the foil in fencing, and are, besides, mostly concealed from sight. The complicated articulations which make up the sound of such a French word as ennui cannot be reproduced correctly by mere imitation except in the case of an exceptionally gifted learner.
[...]Fallacy of Minute Distinctions
The second fallacy is that minute distinctions of sound can be disregarded - or, in other words, that a bad pronounciation does not matter.
[...]
So if we can't learn to pronounce just by imitation, what's the alternative?
Phonetic notation helps the ear in many ways. The spoken word is fleeting, the written word is permanent. However often the learner has the elements of the word ennui repeated to him, it is still a help to have the impressions of his ear confirmed by association with the written symbols of such a transliteration as [a~n;hi]. If the phonetic notation, istead of confirming, corrects an impression of the ear its utility becomes still more manifest.
I've replaced Sweet's phonetic notation with the Kirshenbaum version of the ASCII IPA in the transcription of the French.
[ There's only one IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) but a number of transcriptions of it to the ASCII character set have been proposed. The Kirshenbaum version seems to be the most popular on Usenet's sci.lang. See here for an fairly detailed description, or here for a kindler, gentler introduction. But don't get to attached - I'll be using another ASCII mapping for Swedish. ]
[ to be continued ... ]