Learning Language

Chapter one of the textbook outlines all the basics of speech. Gussenhoven and Kenstowicz explain how the lungs, larynx, and vocal tract all work together to form segments of sound that make up language. When thinking of speech, I always felt as if every letter had a sound and words were made up of these various sounds. I knew that there were silent letters in words but this is different from voiceless. For example, the ‘u’ in guard is silent but the [st] in stay is voiceless. These are entirely different concepts. How do linguistics view ‘silent’ letters and are they even silent at all? Voiceless letters, though they do not make a sound, are still ‘heard’ by others. We still know the person is saying the [st] but we do not actually hear anything. This is interesting and I wonder if I say words like “say” and simply pause after or elongate the ‘s’ would people think I said “stay.” Silent and voiceless letters make it harder for foreign learners. The authors also spoke about syllables and when they are stressed. Stress is another obstacle for language learners. English is left dominant but not all other languages are; perhaps this makes it difficult to construe each individual word. It is also interesting to think about how humans learned to stress certain parts of words. Language is very dynamic and pronunciations change over time. Why do we stress some syllables rather than others? When we learn new words we may often pronounce them incorrectly due to unfamiliarity of the stress. However, the words we do know and have used for years we do not question stress. This makes it difficult to learn languages because one may be saying all the correct words but stressing the incorrect syllable making the string of words incomprehensible.

Chapter two steers away from the anatomical aspect of speech and begins to explain sounds themselves. He speaks of letters having different variations but having the same underlying sound. These variants actually come from systematic rules that modify the letter depending on context. The biggest thing I took away from this reading is that we, as speakers of a common language, follow these rules. English speakers follow the rules but we do not know what they exactly entail and we also do not know how we know them. This should then make it difficult to teach people a language. It forces learners to learn through trial and error and slows the process down. If it were easy to define all of these “systematic rules,” new speakers could then learn to make these new sounds correctly. This reading made me think about language acquisition and gave me a new perspective on speech. It seems that learning to speak would be very difficult given all of these rules and relevant body parts. Why is it so easy to speak and learn new words and languages?