Chicken or the Egg?

 As someone who is very interested in the intersection of translation and communication both articles offered some interesting insights into how language shapes our experiences and the true process of language acquisition.

After reading the Kenstowicz article on Phonological Rules and Representations I realized that all of the 20 or so rules weren't necessarily rules but rather explanations of certain things that sometimes happened in speech. There were no universal rules that applied across languages or that explained systematically why the rules occurred. Most of the rules seemed to explain the exceptions of other rules for example rule 21 (pg. 71) explains that presence of a vowel dictates the voicing of a following consonant but not after flaps, for which there is another rule explaining what happens. I feel that this supports one of the main premises of the paper: some of the rules we speak by are simply imposed by perception. I was especially shocked to learn that the idea of collective phonetic illusion exists considering that we pronounce tents and tends the same which perfectly exemplifies this idea that a lot of the rules we speak by are in our head. As a native speaker of English I would not tell someone learning English to pronounce those words the same way because to me they are different. I feel so much more accomplished as an English speaker to know that I can mindlessly navigate all of these complexities of English phonology.

One thing that struck me from both articles were that these ingrained rules affected more than just the sounds that come out of our mouth but our perceptions and thoughts as well. Kenstowics noted that people who don't understand these phonological subtleties are not considered fluent to native speakers. It creates an accent that will cause native speakers to separate themselves from accented speakers and maybe even make them feel like the person's understanding of their native language is limited as well, which is not always the case.

Similarly, in the Gussenhoven paper, the idea that the different types of phonation inform the meaning of our words is quite cool to think about as well. It gave the example of using a breathy voice to evoke a sexy tone. Which made me wonder if our our vocal organs shaped itself to the experience of sex to create a "sexy voice" or if the idea of sex shaped our vocal cords. If we think of words like splash that have a plosive, it makes me wonder if our bodies adapted to mimmick the sound of a splash when we say the word or did the experience o a splash inform how we described it? It's very interesting. After reading how we create all of the sounds we utter I couldn't help but think of the onomatopoeia both around us and how it corresponds to the same flapping, vibrating and smacking in our vocal cords.