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Slurred languages vs clear languages | ||
Tags: Comprehension/understanding | Listening | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6438 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 17 of 55 16 May 2012 at 7:58am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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"I dunno" being equal to "mmMMmm" is because that's the same tone you say "I dunno" with.
What is a "free translation"? Actually your post confused me. Are you disagreeing about mmMMmm? What would be the original individual words behind "mmMMmm"? I don't see any relation between "I dunno" or "I don't know" and "mmMMmm." There's not even an M anywhere in that phrase. 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 18 of 55 16 May 2012 at 9:34am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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A free translation captures the meaning, but not the form or the choice of words of the original phrase - and that's what happens when you write "I dunno" as a rendering of "mmMMmm".
In some cases something close to "mmMMmm" might actually be a very slurred version of some real words, but in this case there are probably no individual words at all behind "mmMMmm", but just an intonation which carries a meaning. And precisely that reminded me of the situation with free translations from one language to another - with mumblemumble as a separate language. So the relation between "mmMMmm" and "I dunno" is exactly the one you gave yourself, namely that they convey the same meaning, but with different means, which s something quite different from the case where the person actually intends to say "I dunno", but it results in a mumble. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| 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 19 of 55 16 May 2012 at 1:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Which is why I started this off by transcribing the following: "Anh-unh-oh." One is thinking, "I don't know," but drops the "d" and the "kn," and runs it all together, sometimes sounding like a single syllable, but clearly derived from the original standard language. My "bonus question," wherein you don't open your mouth, was a little different, of course. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 20 of 55 16 May 2012 at 2:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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French still has a certain slurred quality to my ears: The liaison and
enchaînement mean that the syllable structure doesn't really the match word boundaries, at least to my anglophone ears. And the clitic pronoun "en" can be really hard to catch at full speed, because the difference between "me" /mə/ and "m'en" /mɑ̃/ can be very slight. In practice, this means that I have to work a little harder at listening comprehension, especially when I encouter lots of unfamiliar words at once. In particular, I find it hugely useful to listen to fast speech while reading a transcript, which trains me to pick up on more of the details. I'm currently puzzling over MC Solaar's Si on t'demande, which sounds to me like either /siɔ̃də.mɑ̃d/ or occasionally /siɔ̃ t də.mɑ̃d/. My wife swears the first case is really /siɔ̃tʔdə.mɑ̃d/, which she says is horribly slurred but comprehensible. Ah, well, that's what I get for trying to understand French rap. :-) Still, none of this is insurmountable—I can understand more and more French with each passing week. News radio and documentaries are often decent now, childrens' cartoons are becoming a lot clearer, and I can parse much of Buffy if I read along with a transcript. Edited by emk on 16 May 2012 at 7:20pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 21 of 55 16 May 2012 at 3:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think people use "slurring" to mean two things here. First, there's the phonology. Students who haven't acquired the phonology of the language find a mismatch between what they hear and what they read and assume it's slurred. In this case, it's not -- it's because they don't understand the phonology and are unable to infer the appropriate realization for what they read. Second, all linguistic systems allow a certain degree of simplification while retaining meaning -- and this obviously goes beyond phonology alone, and is usually highly contextualized, as humming to say yes or no in context shows. I've yet to be convinced that languages vary significantly in how much or how little of this they allow. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4700 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes Speaks: Czech* | Message 22 of 55 16 May 2012 at 6:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
That's called diglossia, not slurring.
I don't think it can be pronounced like that. Are you sure you didn't just mishear the vowel?
Is that slurring or just a contraction? One improtant question is: how do you define "slurred"? The term seems to be meaningless if you use it for regular patterns in the language, instead of just particularly poorly enunciated speech. Is "감서" slurred "거 하면서", or perfectly clearly pronounced "감서"? Edited by LaughingChimp on 16 May 2012 at 6:54pm 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 23 of 55 16 May 2012 at 7:33pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Great example. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Pisces Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4623 days ago 143 posts - 284 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish*, French, SwedishC1, Esperanto Studies: German, Spanish, Russian | Message 24 of 55 16 May 2012 at 7:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
There are no pauses between words in any language spoken at normal speed. (I'm not claiming you say this; I'm just saying this because many people aren't aware of it.) (Source: Basic neuroscience textbook I read some years ago) "Words" are a complicated convention. People think it's very odd that the Romans wrote without spaces between words, but there isn't any "natural reason" to put spaces. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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