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From: rwojcik@atc.boeing.com (Richard Wojcik)
Subject: Re: Acquisition of phonemes thfough foreign influences
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References: <44oghi$ld5@bone.think.com>
Date: Wed, 4 Oct 1995 16:45:56 GMT
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In article <44oghi$ld5@bone.think.com>, sandee@think.com (Daan Sandee) writes:
>In article <DFsDtF.Fq5@eskimo.com> rickw@eskimo.com (Richard Wojcik) writes:
   ...snip...
>|>It is probably better to think of languages with consonant clusters as
>|>forcing their speakers to learn to pronounce them.  That is, all clusters
>|>are intrinsically difficult to pronounce.  English speakers can't pronounce
>|>initial [ts] because their language never made them learn to do it.
>
>I know all that. It does not answer my question.
>Why have the English a problem where the Germans, the French, and
>the Dutch have not ? The only native initial clusters French has left are
>kl-, kr-, pl-, pr-, tr- (and the voiced equivalents). They got rid of
>sk-, sp-, st-, yet they have no problem with "ski", "sport", and "stop", 
>to the great regret of the purists. Nor do they have a problem with
>pn-, ps-, ks-, or ts-.

Actually, I think that I did answer your question, but you didn't seem to follow
the significance of what I was saying.  If all consonant clusters are intrinsically
difficult to pronounce, then  you are asking the wrong question.  What it should
be is:  "Why can Germans, French, Dutch, etc., pronounce these clusters without
difficulty?"  Most of the rest of humanity has trouble with them.  The answer to
your particular question is trivial.  English speakers can't pronounce them because
they didn't have to learn to pronounce them.

>|>I know the next question.  Why don't all languages simply lose their
>|>consonant clusters and never develop them in the first place?  The answer
>|>is that there are other phonological constraints that do things like remove
>|>vowels between consonants in fast or casual speech.  That causes children
>|>learning those languages to sometimes posit clusters rather than lost
>|>vowels in adult speech.  Hence, consonant clusters come and go over time.
>|>There is no logical reason for a language to have certain phonological
>|>patterns.  Children just learn to pronounce the phonological hand that fate
>|>deals them.
>
>That is very interesting, but not the issue I had in mind. I was wondering
>why some languages are better at pronouncing loan words than others.
>The same loan words, in fact (such as "psychic", "pneumatic", "xylophone",
>or "czar"), which are equally foreign to French, Dutch, or German.

Please reread what I wrote, and you will see (I hope) that I was addressing
exactly the issue that you had in mind.  Loan phonology usually comes into a
language when the natives are ready for it.  That is, their phonological system
has evolved to the point where the foreign articulations are no longer difficult.
Consonant clusters of the type you are interested in usually arise through a process
of vowel deletion in fast or casual speech.  When the deletions become sufficiently
common, children tend to analyze the words as lacking the vowels altogether.
Hence, they learn to pronounce clusters, and foreign words with such clusters
pose less of an articulatory challenge.  Although the Greek loans you mention
may be "equally foreign" in all non-Greek languages, their initial consonant
clusters may not be equally difficult to pronounce in all non-Greek languages.
It all depends on how native speakers set up internal phonological forms during
language acquisition.
 
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Richard H. Wojcik               |Boeing Information & Support Services|
|Senior Principal Scientist      |     P.O. Box 24346, MS 7L-43        |
|Natural Language Processing     |     Seattle, WA 98124-0346          |
|================================|     Phone: (206) 865-3844           |
|Opinions expressed above are    |     Fax:   (206) 865-2965           |
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