Blog 2 (Ghoti Fish: The English Nightmare)

Both the Gussenhoven and Kenstowicz emphasized language specificity in terms of patterns found in verbal communication. Gussenhoven mostly explained speech mechanisms giving rise to different verbal sounds. He pointed to various types of phonation that can have different meanings depending on the culture/dialect in which the phonation is performed. For example, the “breathy voice,” characteristic of Marilyn Monroe, indicates sexiness in America, but confidentiality in Europe. The Gussenhoven also explained that English is largely a left-dominant language, explaining why I had to split many words across meters to get trochaic words to fit into iambic meter when composing sonnets in high school. Other languages, however, have other stress patterns. Kenstowicz focused on how different English sounds are phonetically categorized into phonemes and how there is not necessarily a common core of distinctive features. For example, in English, it doesn’t seem like there’s a common trait that groups together all the sounds under the [t] phoneme, and moreover, these sounds share much in common with the sounds grouped under [d]. As I read Kenstowicz’s paper, I thought about how much spelling influences speech perception (e.g. how we hear the [d] in tends), and I hypothesize that non-native English speakers would fare better in terms of pronunciation if they were not taught English spelling until they were conversationally fluent. Children growing up in the U.S. typically hear spoken English words for five years before learning spelling, giving them ample time to learn to pronounce words correctly without the bias of spelling. I recently looked at some of my writing from kindergarten, and while my spelling was atrocious, it was surprisingly comprehensible. I wrote about how my older sister went to the movie theater to watch “hre pdr” with her friend. There may be a few missing letters here and there, but it’s clear I was referring to Harry Potter. In sounding out “Potter,” I chose the [d] phoneme instead of the [t] phoneme, an easy mistake to make, due to their overlap in pronunciation.