I know my maths and two other languages.
But do you
speak those other languages? Have learned to express yourself in them and to converse? To think in those languages? The impression I have is that your other two languages are probably biblical Hebrew and Koine Greek and that your knowledge of them only extends to reading or deciphering biblical texts in the original and studying the meanings of key words. That is a very limited experience compared to learning to use and to think in another language.
From Message 107:
quote:
By far, the native speakers are the worst writers, often unintelligible, who constantly confuse homonyms and end up using the wrong words.
This appears very true and commonplace. It is most probably related to taking one's own for granted and an indifference, while a new immigrant must make greater input to adapt and is usually far more enthusiastic of making it in the new scenario. Here, the native can well fear the new comer.
Why fear? Not everybody is xenophobic.
And it is not at all the case that an immigrant must necessarily do better at learning the native's language. While a non-native learns more than a
monoglot native by studying a to-him-foreign language, it is also true that the native speaker can learn so much more about his own language
by learning another language. Hast du wirklich gar nichts davon verstanden, was Lessing sagte? Didn't you understand anything that Lessing said? That you need to learn a foreign language in order to learn your own. It shouldn't just be everybody else's job to learn English;
we need to learn the other languages ourselves.
From Message 108:
I mean here, what the alphabet 'V' sounds like, when it is spoken. The latin and arabic, for example, did not possess the V sound, while the Hebrew did. Many such alphabetical sounds are missing in european languages, and thus there is a displacement factor, resulting in different pronounciations of words. We call this accents, but mainly it is resultant from the lack of alphabetical sounds.
Uh, no, that is not what causes accents. If you had learned to speak a foreign language, you have known better.
There is a wide variety of possible sounds that the human speech apparatus can produce. The study of those sounds and how they are produced is called
phonology. However, only certain sounds distinguish meaning within a language; those are called
phonemes. Different languages use different phonemes. For example, English has two forms of the "p" sound (one plosive, the other not), but we do not use them to distinguish meaning. However, a South-east Asian language (Cambodian, I think, but it's been decades)
does use those two forms of "p" to distinguish meaning. Therefore, those two forms of "p" are phonemic in that other language, but not in English. When a phoneme can be pronounced in two or more different ways, then those forms are called
allophones -- eg, the "r" in German can be either velar or apico-dental, which sound different but don't change the meaning.
When we learn our native language, we learn to restrict ourselves to the sounds of the phonemes of that language. Furthermore, our brains learn to identify those phonemes and to distinguish between different phonemes (eg, between the voiced and unvoiced apico-dental plosives as demonstrated by the minimal pairs of "bitter" and "bidder" and "latter" and "ladder").
But when we start to learn a new language that has different sounds and uses different phonemes, then multiple problems result in an accent. First, we may not be able to distinguish between phonemes. For example, in Russian palatalization of consonants is phonemic (sounds kind of like placing the semi-vowel "y" between the consonant and the vowel that follows, but that's not what it is). It's difficult for beginning students to hear that. So when the non-native first tries to repeat what he thinks he hears, it's going to come out wrong and he's going to have an "accent".
Second, the non-native will tend to misidentify the sound as being like a different sound in his own native language and so use that instead, which will give him an "accent". A common example of this is a Spanish speaker substituting "ch" for "sh", since the "sh" doesn't exist in Spanish.
Third, the non-native's language may have the same sound as the target language, but it's different phonologically. Therefore, by using his own language's version of that sound he'll sound a bit different, sound "funny", in the target language and so will have an "accent". In a French phonology class, our text (which was in French published in France) contained extensive notes for each sound describing the problems that speakers of specific other language would have in producing that sound. And the same holds true for every language that a foreigner would try to learn.
Fourth, even among native speakers of the same language there are regional differences with favor one allophone over others. And so, even native speakers have "accents". Some of these accents developed in isolation from other regions and some developed under influence from immigrant populations (oh ja, don'cha know?), but they still all develop within the same language and so have nothing at all to do with "alphabetic differences."
Fifth, there are additional elements termed "metalanguage" which are characteristic to different languages. These involve intonation patterns, rise and fall of pitch, and range of pitch. For example (as I recall), Spanish has two pitches, English has four or five, and "Black English" has six (one of which is a falsetto that a man would use when excited or upset). There's a commercial currently on Spanish-language radio in which an Angla comes on speaking perfectly correct Spanish, but her metalanguage is puro anglo and so her "accent" is blatant. Please note that there's nothing at all wrong with her pronounciation, but rather her "accent" is pure metalinguistic in nature. Similarly, the cast of "Your Show of Shows" (eg, Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris) were highly proficient at mimicking the metalanguage of German and French such that they would sound quite proficient at those languages even though the words they were uttering were either pure nonsense or English words that they would throw in so that the audience would kind of follow their babblings. And they did it all "without an accent".
Accents are about phonology and phonemics and metalanguage, not alphabetics.
Edited by dwise1, : added metalanguage
{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)
And we who listen to the stars, or walk the dusty grade,
Or break the very atoms down to see how they are made,
Or study cells, or living things, seek truth with open hand.
The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand.
Deep in flower and in flesh, in star and soil and seed,
The truth has left its living word for anyone to read.
So turn and look where best you think the story is unfurled.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world. (filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber,
No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)
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