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From: rickw@eskimo.com (Richard Wojcik)
Subject: Re:  Allophones of Spanish
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Date: Sat, 11 May 1996 14:42:11 GMT
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Ronald Kephart wrote:
> Rick Wojcik wrote:
> 
> "We spent about 15 minutes of
> class time once when several of the students tried to pin the teacher 
> down on whether "orange" was pronounced "naranja" or "narangja".
> Naturally,  she answered "yes" to each pronunciation and thought the
> students were being difficult.  My attempts to explain the problem were
> met with glassy eyes from both sides.  8^)  Well, I've always believed
> that Linguistics 101 should be a required course for language learners."
> 
> About the pronunciation of /naranxa/:  in this case the /n/ before /x/ 
> (orthographic <j>) should be velar, due to assimilation of point of 
> articulation to the following consonant within a word.  The teacher 
> heard them as the "same sound" because [n] and [ng] (velar nasal) are 
> not contrastive even in Cuban Spanish.  This rule is obligatory, and 
> therefore totally unconscious (prior to Linguistics 101).

Oops!  You're absolutely right.  I don't know why I remembered the word as
"naranja".  My wife, who was also in that class, reminded me that the word
we argued over was the pronunciation of "bien".  Sorry for the confusion.

> On the other hand, the velarization of /n/ in word-final position is a 
> variable rule, so that Cubans might pronouce 'bread' as [pan] or [pang].  
> I think they're more likely to hear the difference in this position, 
> though.  Cubans and and some others may also elide the final nasal 
> completely, leaving nasalization of the preceding vowel as its only 
> trace, resulting in [pa~] (I can't get the tilde over the vowel in this 
> format).

Right.  It is often (mistakenly) claimed that speakers don't hear
allophonic variation.  It is technically more accurate to say that they
hear the allophonic variation, but they unconsciously treat the different
sounds as identical during speech processing.  Phonemic hearing is such
that identical sounds sometimes get perceived as different ones, too.  In
the case I experienced, the teacher knew of the n/ng distinction because
she had been taught English.  However, she couldn't always make the
distinction in monitoring speech, and she seemed somewhat oblivious to the
variation in her dialect of Spanish.  She genuinely believed that her
students were being difficult when they asked her the difference between
"bien" and "bien(g)".






-- 
Rick Wojcik  rickw@eskimo.com     Seattle (for locals: Bellevue), WA
             http://www.eskimo.com/~rickw/
