In “The Production of Speech,” Gussenhoven details the various organs used in speech and the different ways they move to form a variety of noises we comprehend as words. As he broke down the complex way our tongue moves to form vowels, I was struck by the insane amount of physical co-ordination it takes to produce the noises of speech. Even more amazing was the fact that this process is for most of us, unconscious and instantaneous. Our body moves seamlessly with our intentions.
While Gussenhoven detailed the physical way speech is produced, Kenstowicz moved up a level of abstraction to discuss how the sounds of speech are related to our understanding of it. Given this vast multitude of different sounds Gussenhoven described, Kenstowicz showed how we sometimes perceive different sounds as being the same (ie, the phoneme ‘t’ and its many allophones) and the same sound as being different (as in ride and write). Rather than there being a physical schema behind why certain sounds were conceptually related, Kenstowicz cited the theories of Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle that posited a psychological organization superimposed on these sounds after they are learned.
A common sentiment I felt while reading these two selections was a sense of awe that the majority of us have successfully learned to speak. As I read through this, I wondered whether a phonetic system that addressed the physical and psychological structure behind a language could help with this learning process. I thought about what I had learned of the Korean phonetic alphabet, Hangeul, during an immersive language program a couple summers ago.
When King Sejong invented Hangeul in 1446, he did so while studying the way the tongue moved in the mouth to pronounce words. As a result, the different symbols for consonants are shaped like how the tongue is shaped when pronouncing that same word. Hangeul also has an extremely simple way of fitting together vowels and consonants to form blocks of sound, so there are few of those complicated spelling exceptions you’d find in most organic alphabets and South Korea’s literacy rate is almost at 100%. I bring all this up because I feel like Hangeul is structured to simplify and clarify the physical/phonological structure behind spoken Korean. Would a truly phonetic alphabet system help speed up the learning process behind spoken languages, or would the pace of learning the physical/psychological systems remain the same?
Wow, that’s really interesting that Hangeul characters are based on how each sound is made! I wonder if there are still instances of multiple allophones mapping to a single character, or if the alphabet is like the IPA and has enough characters to cover all the different sounds in Korean.
ReplyDeleteDo you know if tying pronunciation to characters has helped the language’s sound stay consistent over time? I know English has experienced some major vowel changes over the past few hundred years, and in particular there was a major vowel shift between 1350 and 1600 that created a lot of spelling inconsistencies and makes it difficult for modern readers to understand middle English texts. It seems like a phonetic-based system like Hangeul might prevent the spoken and written versions of the language from evolving semi-independently, like what happened with English.
It definitely seems like a phonetic system like Hangeul could speed up the learning process – as long as people could easily distinguish the different sounds the characters corresponded to. For example, trying to write English phonetically would be difficult for most speakers because our perception of the phonemes is so different from the actual sounds, but this mismatch may itself be a result of English spelling. Maybe learning a phonetic alphabet system early on would make people more aware of the languages’ phonetics and reduce the need for the complicated phonological rules that Kenstowicz describes?