On my way to school, I would listen to the news from the radio in spanish while studying for the Literature test in English. At school, I would talk with my friends in Spanish while we worked together in writing our hypothesis and conclusions, in English, for our science class. After school, my mom would interrupt me from reading my favorite Harry Potter book, in English, so that I would discuss with her, in Spanish, about what I learned that day at school.
Living in a bordertown, I had the opportunity to live in Mexico while attending an American school in California. Although my American education goes back to my kindergarten years, it was until around 4rd grade that I learned how to pronounce the word kindergarten; d sound instead of t sound, of course. Because of my personal experience, I therefore found Kenstowicz article very insightful and comforting. His distinction between phonology and phonetics provides insight about how despite the fact that someone studies the language since an early age, there is no better advantage for owning the language than being a native speaker. Being raised in a home where spanish was always spoken, my speech production process, which Gussenhoven described to be developed using the structural features of sound necessary to make a conversation in that language, was developed in Spanish. Hence it explains why it is innate for me to imitate Spanish sounds, whereas english sounds require for me to pay close attention and listen carefully. When it comes to writing, however, there is no doubt that my English spelling is much better than my Spanish spelling.
Even as a native, it is hard for me to locate where the spanish ‘acento’ in a word because of my inability to interpret where the stressed syllable is. As Kenstowics discusses, the stressed and unstressed syllables play a crucial part of our speech, and being able to distinguish such, is elemental for the right pronunciation. Yet, although I speak using the proper stressed and unstressed sounds, I have no explanation as to why or how I came up to that conclusion. It is just the phonology part of it. Similarly, my friends at school whose english was their first laguage had no explanation for me as to why they skipped vowels and consonants that I clearly saw written on paper. At first, I thought that skipping the sounds of letters was a way for them to seem rebel and cool. It took me several years to realize that their ‘rebel and cool’ way of speaking, was actually the way everyone spoke. What a shame it was to learn about all these years I could have been as cool as they were.
As to Gussenhoven, I found very well explained and detailed the process behind language production. I liked how he specified that speech is not solely acquired, but developed and shaped by sounds created around us through the conjunction of multiple organs.
Hi Dania,
ReplyDeleteI think that the bilingual perspective on these two readings is an interesting one. There are innate sounds and pronunciations that native speakers just know and people trying to learn the language struggle with. Your commentary on spelling better in English but speaking better in Spanish is intriguing. It definitely ties in with Kenstowicz in that many of the sounds that we make when saying words are not reflected in the spelling of such words. There is a whole component of language not written. It is an oral tradition. This seems to explain why you wondered why native English speakers don't say certain vowels even when they are clearly written on the page.
I am a native English speaker but I also struggle with this. I have pronunciation issues when I try to say words I have only read in books. For instance, the word "placate" was one that I had only read in a book. The first time I said the word out loud, I said it with the "c" pronounced as an "s." People laughed at me. But this serves to illustrate the overarching point that much of the language we use does not appear in its written form and can only be learned and understood through speaking.
Dania,
ReplyDeleteThe account of thinking your friends were being rebellious and cool by skipping letters in words is hilarious and such a good representation of how wacky learning about phonetics highlights our written language to be. It makes me wonder why our written languages weren't written phonetically rather than the often unintuitive way they are composed today.
Hi Dania,
ReplyDeleteI too find myself consciously thinking about where the "acento" goes when writing in Spanish, often finding myself saying the word out loud multiple times to hear how each syllable is stressed. This remark reminded me of when a friend asked me, "Do you think in Spanish or English?" I remember hesitating and saying it depends, sometimes I think in English and sometimes I think in Spanish.
I wonder how thinking and having an internal dialogue in a specific language affects how language "sounds" when we speak it out loud? For example, since coming to college I speak English much more often and thus find myself thinking more in English as well. Which makes me wonder if we subconsciously interact with phonology when we think or have an internal dialog with ourselves? We are not physically uttering the words, but we are still "hearing" the words.
Hi Dania,
ReplyDeleteI can relate to your inability to recognized stressed syllables. Although I speak and understand Spanish perfectly, I write Spanish without accents, and the hardest part of learning French was memorizing were the accents went.
I agree with you that at some point you have to accept your own unique pronunciation of the language, yet there probably has to be a minimum similarity it must retain with other speakers of that language before you are seen as the "outcast" we have read about in Johnson and Gussenhoven. I wonder if linguists have a way of drawing that line for a language, and whether it is specific to people within a region and experiences.
I think you've articulated a great and, for many people in California, familiar point here. My father's family is from Mexico and his own inability to catch the nuances in American speech kept him from ever feeling wholly confident in his ability to speak English. So he decided that me and my sister would learn English first and then learn Spanish in school. Being from a place with a large concentration of migrant workers and their children, my first lessons in Spanish came on playgrounds at recess while trying to make sense of the words other students were saying. So I've constantly run into this phenomena with my family and friends, where my family purposefully stay away from certain words for the fear that they still can't "correctly" pronounce them. Similarly, because I grew up around so many people who kept the Spanish pronunciation of words I learned certain words differently than some of my later friends who grew up in predominantly white communities. Later in school with the introduction of AP classes and more advanced subject matter I got a whole new set of vocabulary and the suddenly I became the kid who struggled in confidence pronouncing certain words because, in large part to family and playmates, I held on to the Spanish pronunciation of certain sounds. But after seeing how truly complex sound production is and how hard it is to even get the sounds you want out, let alone change the default of how you make them, I agree that it's extremely comforting to know that there is no "right" way to say these words -- it all just depends on how the beautiful mixture of backgrounds you received to determine how your voice spices up conversation.
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