Mother Tongue

A fact from class that has stuck with me is that all humans are capable of producing sounds from all languages- besides the rolled 'r' used in Spanish. With a combination of thorough physiological description and phonetic rules, Gussenhoven and Kenstowicz raise interesting questions about what phonetic differences characterize different languages. Both pieces pulled examples from a variety of languages, not just English, raising the question of what it truly means to speak a language- and whether it's possible to learn the implicit phonetic nuances of a language that is not your mother tongue.

Gussenhoven presents a detailed view of sounds production from a physiological perspective, outlining the organs of speech and how they interact to produce certain sounds. By detailing the way a breathy voice is produced by not closing the glottis completely to create a small amount of friction, different parts of the tongue creating tense vs. lax vowels in German, and which part of the vocal tract is used in nasalization (soft palate) among other specifics, he presents a reduced view of sound as an anatomical act, in line with the fact that humans can produce sounds from all languages. However, Kenstowicz discusses a compelling aspect of sounds production: context. His argument that there is no "invariant core" of a phoneme and that language is a system of ideal sounds (Edward Sapir) produces a view of language as dependent upon implicitly learned context. If "tents" and "tends" are physically produced the same way, how do we know which one is being spoken?

These views of language production raise questions about the relationship between spoken and written language. Kenstowicz briefly mentioned that we could have a unique consonant for the dental-stop-ed 't' that occurs in "writer", since it is different from 't' in other contexts. In most languages, there are far fewer characters/ways of representing sound than there are actual sounds. The rules of different sounds that can arise from the same letters are what people implicitly learn. This pattern of immense variety stemming from a limited set of rules is a familiar one. Perhaps language production is so varied because it's a recursive process, the production of one sound being dependent not just on the preceding letters but also on the preceding words in a phrase.

In my eighth grade Spanish class, I remember the teacher struggling to teach us how to properly pronounce the rhotic 'r' in "pero". While we were perfectly capable of producing the sound (same as the 't' in "writer"), we struggled to do it in a Spanish context. In this case, maybe seeing the written word was working against us. Seeing "pero" written out evoked a pronunciation that would've made sense in an English context- one with the 'r' pronounced like in "parasol." It's these nuances that differentiate native speakers and those who have picked up a foreign language, and learning them may be why children pick up languages best at a young age. To speak a foreign language is not only to sound different, but to read what may be the same letters with a new sound.