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Slurred languages vs clear languages | ||
Tags: Comprehension/understanding | Listening | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5336 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 9 of 55 15 May 2012 at 9:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
As soon as I read the title of this thread, I immediately thought of English as a good example of a language that sounds slurred to me. I think it may be due to a combination of unstressed vowels being pronounced as schwas and words being mashed together left and right, but it varies from speaker to speaker. I actually quite like the sound of it but unfortunately, because I am so used to it, my own articulation is dreadful. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| a3 Triglot Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5257 days ago 273 posts - 370 votes Speaks: Bulgarian*, English, Russian Studies: Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Finnish | Message 10 of 55 15 May 2012 at 9:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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IMO Norwegian is as slurred as it can get. French is also quite slurred.
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| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4689 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 11 of 55 15 May 2012 at 10:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
Perhaps you could call colloquial English an "optionally tonal language." I can say, essentially, "No. What? I don't know." Except I can say it with zero consonants, and be understood. An approximate transliteration of this slurry nonsense might be: "Unh-uh. Enhhuh? Anh-unh-oh." EDIT: For extra bonus points, try saying it without opening your mouth at all. Edited by geoffw on 15 May 2012 at 10:05pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 12 of 55 15 May 2012 at 10:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
I have to disagree with you on this one. Even if you can recognize all the phonemes in isolation, know various common reduction and elision patterns, and have a decent grasp of the prosody, some languages drop a lot more in 'typical' speech than others do, as compared to spoken literary/broadcast registers of the same language, and not all of this can be regularly predicted with a knowledge of the phonology, much less understood on the fly. If the phrase you're trying to figure out has half as many syllables when you encounter it as you'd expect from what you heard on the news or the tape that came with the course you're using, there's an additional learning curve. 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4845 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 13 of 55 15 May 2012 at 10:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Icelandic is spoken fast as hell and slurred as it can be. I have a really hard time understanding spoken Icelandic. I'm at a point now where I can understand the recorded dialogues of my Icelandic course without the help of the book, but Icelandic TV or radio? Forget it! Fortunately, there is the educational TV programme Viltu læra íslensku?, which is subtitled. I remember an episode where the main character mumbled something like "Soo" and it was subtitled "Við skulum sjá" ("We will see"). Just crazy! Edited by Josquin on 15 May 2012 at 10:27pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6438 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 14 of 55 16 May 2012 at 12:45am | IP Logged | |||||
lol, yes, "i don't know" can be said simply by changing the tone of "mmmmmm." "mm- (low) -mm- (high) -mm" (low/mid) "mmMMmm" = "I dunno" And everyone understands this. Even little kids. Can you think of any more examples like this? Edited by IronFist on 16 May 2012 at 12:48am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vientito Senior Member Canada Joined 6339 days ago 212 posts - 281 votes | Message 15 of 55 16 May 2012 at 2:36am | IP Logged | |||||
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Slurred speech is really the major hurdle for most non-native speakers to overcome before they will reach nirvana (for some it will never be attainable)
Words in disguise: what starts out sounding like "samedi" in french would be just "sans me dire". There are numerous ridiculous examples like that in real-life situations. The issue here is how well one can exploit the context to infer what's being said. For those who have experience with korean please hear this recording and focus on the part starting at the 1st second. recording the wording: 해보다가 안되면 잘하는거 하면서 편하게 살면 되겠지만, 난 이렇게 안하면 당장 먹고 살길이 막막해 지거든 The part in question is 잘하는거 하면서. "거 하면서" is slurred to condense down to "감서" To undertrained ears, there are practically no way to hear from the phonetics and apply whatever rules that you know to extract the individual words. But if you present this to native speakers they will have no problem giving you the answer. The point is that this game is not just about hearing in itself it is also about inferring with a vaste knowledge base of the language. Native speakers could fill in those gaps at ease because they "know" the language. Until you "know" the language don't expect that you could do the same thing. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 55 16 May 2012 at 2:54am | IP Logged | |||||
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There are a couple of of things that can make a language sound slurred. The most obvious is of course that neighbouring sounds in some languages affect each other much more than they do in others - and then the pronunciation can be difficult to catch in writing without making it extremely complicated. Right now I'm studying Irish which is an extreme example of this. Let me just mention that the beginnings of words are changed according to two major schemes (lenition, eclipsis plus some minor satellite schemes) based on preceding words, i.e. more based on grammatical criteria than on phonological factors. If you see a word in a text with 'h' as the second letter then it is mostly an example of this, and the word has no 'h' in its dictionary form. Eclipsis means that you see a letter (or letter combination) placed before the original letter, which however becomes mute in the process. Actually the Irish orthography isn't irregular in the same sense as the English one - it is more a case of becoming very complicated because it frenetically tries to reflect the complications of the language iself. In contrast the individual sounds of Italian tend to be independent of each other, and it sounds like the words are spat out at the speed of a machine gun.
Another thing that can make a language sound slurred is a stress pattern where a few syllables are stressed and everything in between is toned down, which often means that entire syllables are 'eaten'. Danish is notorious for this. However such languages CAN be spoken clearly if need be, so the process isn't irreversible. Examples like "mmMMmm" = "I dunno" really illustrate something else, namely the concept of free translations. The person who wrote "I dunno" didn't try to find any original individual words behind "mmMMmm", but chose to render the intended meaning with a totally different expression. In less extreme cases there actually are some 'real' words behind some incomprehensible burp and you can chose to write them down or (once again) write something different which basically has the same meaning. Edited by Iversen on 22 August 2012 at 12:22pm 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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