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Path: utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!cognos!roberts
From: roberts@cognos.uucp (Robert Stanley)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Language Learning
Message-ID: <1855@cognos.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 25-Nov-87 10:47:49 EST
Article-I.D.: cognos.1855
Posted: Wed Nov 25 10:47:49 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 29-Nov-87 07:37:04 EST
References: <386@cogen.UUCP>
Reply-To: roberts@cognos.UUCP (Robert Stanley)
Organization: Cognos Inc., Ottawa, Canada
Lines: 83
Summary: Some phonemes CAN be learned

In article <386@cogen.UUCP> alen@cogen.UUCP (Alen Shapiro) writes:

>I remember a few years ago having an interesting conversation
>with a visiting Russian postgraduate. He was trying to teach me how
>to annunciate the Russian (or was it Checkoslovakian (sp?)) SHJ
>character. I recall hearing a difference in the sound he was making
>but I was unable to quantify this difference sufficiently well to
>notice if my attempts were getting better or worse (much to my
>frustration and his ammusement). I DO believe the problem is
>largely auditory and some facet has to do with crystalization of audio
>pathways however I have developed a healthy respect for the complexity
>of human perception and would not presume to think that this is
>the WHOLE story.

I learned Russian as a teenager, primarily as a written language to deal with
scientific publications.  I took some conversational Russian courses in music
appreciation aged 19-21 and was rapidly able to learn to distinguish the
various phonemes necessary, although I apparently always spoke them with a
marked 'foreign' accent.  A decade later as a member of a choral singing group
we were making recordings of a number of works with Russian libretti, and one
of our number, a teacher and fluent russian speaker, derived an english
phonemic transliteration of the russian texts.  This proved sufficiently good
that, sung by 120 voices, our Muscovite conductor for the recording sessions
was a) moved to tears by the poetry and b) dispensed with the language coach
he had brought with him.  So it is clearly possible to take 120 fairly random
members of an urban culture, admittedly with trained ears, and teach them to
correctly enunciate a totally foreign language to a very demanding standard
of clarity and acceptability to a native speaker of that language.  Of course,
Russian and English are very similar languages.

(digression: my conversational russian teacher always called the SHJ sound
	     'beetle', because the cyrillic character )|( sort of resembles
	     one.  Says little about his knowledge of entomology!)

In the mid 70's I spent 15 months working in Iraq at the Atomic Energy Centre,
where the languages spoken are Arabic, German, English, and French, in
descending order of frequency.  At first, I was unable to distinguish between
the various Arabic gutturals - GH, KH, QUH, etc. - but a month or two of
constant exposure (all my colleagues spoke Arabic among themselves) served to
make the distinction obvious.  Unfortunately, I had little chance to practice
speaking because social contact was discouraged, and business was technical and
conducted in the European languages, which meant that I learned to make myself
understood, but always amid laughter.

Other European colleagues, fluent in several European languages were both more
and less successful, with the wooden spoon going to a Scot with a perpetual
thick Glaswegian accent.  I have wondered whether my early upbringing played a
part in language learning: my infant language was Urdu, and my early childhood
languages Zulu and Swazi, all learned from servants and their children, while
my first formal education was in Afrikaans (bears the same relation to
contemporary Dutch as Shakespearean English does to contemporary English).
English was spoken only in parental company, and on the occasion of social
visits with the children of other anglophones.

I have heard a theory propounded that, once one has mastered the technique of
learning a new language, any new language can be added with reasonable
facility.  The numbers quoted (I've long ago lost the reference) were three
languages to start the process, and eight to complete.  More than eight
languages mastered apparently makes mastering another simply a question of
effort.  It would be interesting to know if this requires the first few
languages to be learned early (I wouldn't even recognize Urdu today, but still
have some Zulu), and if it works because the brain has developed some new
patterning skill, or has simply been exposed to so many phonetic variants that
what most people accept as commonplace (and ignore) ceases to be so.  I suspect
that there is an enormous social and cultural element present in the language-
learning process.

>--alen the Lisa slayer (it's a long story)

I still have a Lisa - it's the workhorse of my preferred computing environment

>fi ll er li ne s wi th mo in fo rm at io n co nt en t
                        ^
			who's this mo character, and what info does he
			have that might be relevant?  ;-)
			(It's easier to global edit the '>' to something else)

Robert_S
-- 
R.A. Stanley             Cognos Incorporated     S-mail: P.O. Box 9707
Voice: (613) 738-1440 (Research: there are 2!)           3755 Riverside Drive 
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