From: Wade T.Smith (wade_smith@harvard.edu)
Date: Thu 21 Nov 2002 - 05:55:51 GMT
On Wednesday, November 20, 2002, at 11:49 , Jeremy Bradley wrote:
> So I think that he heard it the way that we said
> it alright, it's just that he had to think the syllables differently.
My girlfriend is an israeli, and we have some difficulty speaking to
each other, although she is well acclimated to english, but hebrew is
her native language. Her sister's name has that peculiar to hebrew
consonant that Hanukkah begins with, after a 'T' sound, and, to me, and
to many other english speakers, we hear an 'r', so that I phonetically
spell her sister's name as 'Tria', but she always looks at me sideways
and asks how I could put an 'R' in there? Her own attempt to spell her
sister's name in english produced 'Techia', but, truly, that is useless
to approximate the sound using english phonemes, and I've told her that
several times.
At any rate- the ability to hear phonemes is tied inextricably to the
way things are spelled, as you've shown us with the fried flies, and
with hebrew, and chinese, not only are phonemes different, missing, or
impossible to reproduce without intense training, but the characters of
the writing itself are untransferable. It is a dauntless task, but I,
for one, like to see as close a phonetic version as possible.
- Wade
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