Both readings forced me to analyze my everyday speech in ways I would have never imagined. Gussenhoven described the separate and unique role that each organ of speech plays when we talk. I was shocked by the numerous ways in which we pronounce just five vowels in the English language, and I continued to be intrigued by the ways in which English-speakers intrinsically stress the left-dominant feet in our words.
Kenstowicz also portrayed the countless allophones of the same phoneme. While English speakers pronounce "tend" and "tent" differently, we ignore the "d" and "t" when saying "tends" and "tents." For those trying to learn English, these small nuances are extremely hard to catch and incorporate. Thanks to context, we are able to understand each other when using words that sounds the same but have different meanings.
Kenstowicz also went on to say that the consonants following vowels influence the way in which we pronounce those vowels. This especially struck me, and I found myself saying different words out loud to test this. To my surprise, this rule consistently rang true, and once again, I felt bad for all the non-native English speakers trying to learn and speak English. When trying to learn Hindi in middle school, I was amazed at how much easier it is to read and write a phonetic language like Hindi. All of the silent letters, constrictions, and articulations of English make our language incredibly unique but hard to learn.
Hi Priya! Kenstowicz' article struck me similarly. I realized that there really is no "ideal" way to say a specific written word in English, and though we sometimes claim that a word must be spoken in a certain way, there often isn't actually something written clearly in the word that says so. It made me want to not negatively critique different accents, or even hold one person's accent as better than another, especially if the person is attempting to pronounce their version of a specific phoneme.
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