It's even more complicated than that when speaking and hearing between two people with vastly different base languages when one is trying to learn the language of the other.

The problem is our brain is a powerful tool and it learns phonemes. It operates in some ways (when recognizing speech) as soundex software does.

So if you say something in your native language to me (and mine is very different) and I say it back to you, often you will say 'No,no,no! That's not what I said!'. Then there will be cycles of me repeating it to me, me hearing it, and me saying it back, and you telling me I still haven't got it.

Why? Because not all languages have the same set of phonemes. That matters because your brain, when it hears a word, will try to decode it using the *existing* set of phonemes it has. It will give you the best version it can, but it can be missing phonemes or accents or stresses, etc. because it is not familiar with them.

So you say X to me.
I hear X in a way that is governed by my normal language.
I then try to repeat X as I heard it back to you.
You hear my X and it sounds wrong to you.

What you said and what I heard, if we could record both the audible word and what your brain made it sound like to you via audio processing, would not be the same.

In order to get past this, you basically have to focus very hard at hearing the sounds as sounds and disengage your mental audio post-processing that is mucking up your 'heard' word. If you can get to just picking up the audible sound, as alien as it might be, you can then try to pronounce it correctly back.

Of course, you'll still fail. Because you don't likely have the lip/tongue/breathe etc. combo to get it out. But you are a bit closer.

Then you learn to form the particular missed sound and say it enough time, your ear hears it enough time, and you get told to improve it enough times... and then you now have that new phoneme with accent/stress/breathing/etc as part of your raw audio postprocessing.

This isn't an easy process if the two languages are far apart in range of phonemes. You can miss many bits of the communication unfortunately.

I've tried to get a sense of some languages that use tonality for key information and it kills me. I just have never developed the sense of tonality that most asian languages used and frankly, a lot of the pitches and tonalities make me actively have that 'nail on chalkboard' response. I find them grating or annoying. It's nothing other than my brain's reaction to the unfamiliarity and the pitches. They come off as angry, sharp, or hectoring... not because they are, but because of pace, cadence, and tone. In English, someone going really fast, in sharp pitches, and with sounds like a cat fight come across as hostile, angry, bellicose... and that's the way my ears hear it. I know that is totally the result of having grown up in a slower, less tonality dependent language. It's just not easy to decouple that response (as compared to trying to learn Broad Scots, Latin, French, Spanish, or Russian) for me.

On Thu, Sep 10, 2020 at 3:20 PM Jeff Zeitlin <xxxxxx@freelancetraveller.com> wrote:
On Thu, 10 Sep 2020 17:48:39 +0000 (UTC), "Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at
yahoo.com (via tml list)" <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote to Freelance
Traveller:

> 1) tried to talk on the phone with tech-support in India & just could NOT understand his english so we went into chat mode on our pc's & it turned out that his grammar was impeccable! No problems after that.

Accent and intonation varies _widely_. The example that comes to mind
immediately is that your Indian TS guy might well "develop" programs or
scripts in text chat, but you'll hear him pronounce it "devil up" on the
phone.

At one point, my father (a New Yorker) was working for a company that had
customers in Australia, where he was sent to give a workshop on the
company's products.  He came back and said that he wasn't sure what they
were speaking, but it wasn't English.

Loren Wiseman once told a story about being with a tour group in Sweden,
along with a Norwegian and a Finn.  The language of the group was English,
and everyone spoke it - but Loren ended up "translating" between the
Norwegian (who was speaking English) and the Finn (who was speaking
English), as he could understand both (speaking English), and both could
understand him (speaking English), but neither could understand the other.

Americans are _not_ at a disadvantage when _speaking_ to others for whom
English is a known language; American entertainment has gone world-wide,
and most English speakers will have been exposed to, at the very least,
"Midwestern newscaster" English, and probably a couple of others, like "New
York", "Texan", or "Southern", as well. We are, however, at a disadvantage
when _listening_ to others speak, because for the most part, we don't get
to hear other forms of the language in entertainment; the most we're likely
to hear is the Received Standard of the UK.

>2) when I first started school the majority faction in the ed establishment was, IMO, very into trying to 'regularize' the english lang (NO SPLIT INFINITIVES!) but as the years went by and 'baby-boomers' appeared as teachers in classrooms, thing began to change & by the time college came around, things had changed A LOT!

Not so much "regularizing" the language, as trying to (inappropriately)
apply the rules for Latin to English. For many years - decades - Latin was
seen as the sine qua non of languages, and it wasn't until almost the 1970s
that that attitude was finally abandoned, and English taught on its own
terms.

Like James Nicolls said, English doesn't borrow words; it follows other
languages into dark alleys, hits them over the head, and rifles their
pockets for loose vocabulary (and grammar).


®Traveller is a registered trademark of
Far Future Enterprises, 1977-2020. Use of
the trademark in this notice and in the
referenced materials is not intended to
infringe or devalue the trademark.

--
Jeff Zeitlin, Editor
Freelance Traveller
    The Electronic Fan-Supported Traveller® Resource
xxxxxx@freelancetraveller.com
http://www.freelancetraveller.com

Freelance Traveller extends its thanks to the following
enterprises for hosting services:

onCloud/CyberWeb Enterprises (http://www.oncloud.io)
The Traveller Downport (http://www.downport.com)
-----
The Traveller Mailing List
Archives at http://archives.simplelists.com/tml
Report problems to xxxxxx@simplelists.com
To unsubscribe from this list please go to
http://www.simplelists.com/confirm.php?u=RDHE7iRpfwqlHvVvWBIhpJZsbTiD5NnL