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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6437 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 1 of 21 12 March 2010 at 6:11am | IP Logged |
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I was thinking about how (to my ears) some languages are straight forward and pronounced the way they sound and are written, such as Japanese. Sure, when Japanese gets spoken quickly (or even slowly sometimes) some of the i's and u's become silent (I know that apostrophes don't make words plural, but saying "some of the is and us become silent" just looks weird).
I was thinking about this in the context of how difficult it is for me to understand spoken Korean, and I had a thought: With Japanese, I hear a new word and I instantly know how to say it and how to write it (not Kanji, obviously, but hiragana). I know how to write it. I know how to say it. Japanese people understand me when I say it the first time. I know how to look it up in a dictionary. With Korean, I hear it being spoken and, 90% of the time, could come up with 7 or 8 ways to write it (none of which may even be correct, lol). So I came to the conclusion that in learning Korean I should possibly make the distinction between SPOKEN and WRITTEN. At first, I thought "oh boy, that's going to be hard." But then I thought "wait a sec, isn't English the same way?" I started thinking of more and more examples of how SPOKEN English is different from WRITTEN English. want to = "wanna" Even when people see "want to" written in a book, they will often say "wanna." I don't know = "i dunno" which commonly becomes "Ionno" (and can even be communicated simply by making the "mmm" sound in the correct series of tones... not sure how to write that without a music staff, lol) Anyway, I was thinking about how it must be to learn Chinese, where you learn how to say a word, and then you learn how to write it, and there's no connection. I wonder if Korean essentially has to be learned in that same way, in which case it would boil down to a phenomenal memorization exercise rather than with Japanese where you only have to remember 46 or however many kana (not including Kanji). The thread in the other forum about 어떡해 vs 어떻게 made me think of this. I mean come on. And I'm sure there are probably 8 other words that are pronounced just like those, too!!! Oh, based on the title of this thread... is there a name for the phenomenon of words being pronounced differently from how they are written? Like "want to" becoming "wanna" or "i don't know" becoming "ionno"? And I don't just necessarily mean words being slurred... but I mean to the extent that you can write "wanna" and people will know what you mean, or you can write "i dunno" or even "ionno" and people will understand what you mean. Sorry I'm scatterbrained tonight. But with English, you can't really know how to spell a word just because you know how to say it (UNLIKE with Japanese), and Korean seems to be the same way. So in that sense, Korean and English are similar. But when I learned English I had the advantage of being born and brought up in America so it was easy! Time to go to bed. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Pyx Diglot Senior Member China Joined 5735 days ago 670 posts - 892 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 2 of 21 12 March 2010 at 6:48am | IP Logged |
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You're right with the i's and u's (see How to use an apostrophe. Don't worry, it's from The Oatmeal, so it's funny and not boring :) )
Hey, do you really say "ionno"? Where in the states are you from? I can't recall ever having heard that. "I'd'no", yes, but "ionno"? Also, Chinese is a pain the ass for that exact reason :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Astrophel Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5732 days ago 157 posts - 345 votes Speaks: English*, Latin, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Cantonese, Polish, Sanskrit, Cherokee | Message 3 of 21 12 March 2010 at 6:56am | IP Logged |
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I'm in California and I both say and hear "ionno" quite often. I heard it in the Southern US too. I know it's not common in parts of the Northeast, though, where they tend to over-enunciate rather than slur.
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| Pyx Diglot Senior Member China Joined 5735 days ago 670 posts - 892 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 4 of 21 12 March 2010 at 7:30am | IP Logged |
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Hm. It's quite possible that I imagine a 'd' in there, when, in fact, there is none. I'll listen closely the next time :)
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| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5556 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 5 of 21 12 March 2010 at 10:24am | IP Logged |
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"wanna" = "want to"; "dunno" = "don't know"; "gonna" = "going to", etc...
...these are normally referred to as "informal contractions" or "reduced forms". It's interesting to note that this occurs in most languages, not just English. Here are links to some common contractions in Chinese and Japanese too. Edited by Teango on 12 March 2010 at 10:27am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5403 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 6 of 21 12 March 2010 at 1:15pm | IP Logged |
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Well for the languages which are written exactly like they are spoken it's said they use phonemic orthography (like Serbian). Languages which are not written they are spoken most of the time use "defective" orthography (like English). Most languages use a combination of both.
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| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5556 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 7 of 21 12 March 2010 at 1:27pm | IP Logged |
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Yes...I've heard this about Croatian too, which I think is such a benefit when learning a language. I was often told that most southern Slavic languages can boast a lot of phonemic orthography in general. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about it all:
"Scripts with a good grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence include those of Albanian, Armenian, Bulgarian, Basque, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Hindi, Hungarian, Korean, Macedonian, Polish, Romanian, Sanskrit, Turkish, Greek, Italian, Somali, Spanish and Serbian. Most constructed languages such as Esperanto and Lojban have phonemic orthographies." [source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography ] Edited by Teango on 12 March 2010 at 1:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5403 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 8 of 21 12 March 2010 at 1:54pm | IP Logged |
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Croatian is a bit less phonemic than Serbian. Being essentially the same language, the only difference in writing Croatian is that they try to hold on to etymological orthography, which mostly applies only whether the root of the word is written with a voiced or voiceless consonant. Edited by Delodephius on 12 March 2010 at 1:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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