Timeline for Do native speakers distinguish well the pronunciations of "L" and "R"?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
20 events
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| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:55 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://ell.stackexchange.com/ with https://ell.stackexchange.com/
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| Oct 17, 2015 at 16:42 | comment | added | j_foster | Bad paragraph removed. Sorry, I'm still getting used to how SE works and have been offline for several days, or I would have fixed it sooner. | |
| Oct 17, 2015 at 16:40 | history | edited | j_foster | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Removed bad example based on comment suggestions.
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| Oct 15, 2015 at 10:27 | comment | added | trlkly | Listen to Araucaria. If you don't take it out, someone else probably will. This place prefers that bad examples be removed entirely. We can always click "edited" link to see the earlier version. | |
| Oct 14, 2015 at 10:14 | comment | added | reinierpost | It's misleading to speak of L and R as "sounds". Rather, they are phonemes: ranges of possible sounds that are systematically identified within the language. In English, a range of possible sounds "sound as" the phoneme "L", and another range "sounds as" "R". As far as I know, these ranges are completely distinct, even for different speakers of English: one person's L can never be another person's R. However, the same speakers may distinguish between "hard L" and "soft L" when speaking a language in which those are different phonemes, such as French or Russian. | |
| Oct 13, 2015 at 14:59 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| Oct 13, 2015 at 16:52 | |||||
| Oct 13, 2015 at 8:44 | comment | added | Araucaria - Not here any more. | Just take the S paragraph out!!!!!!!!!!!!! Pleeeeaaaaaaaasssssseeeee :-) | |
| Oct 13, 2015 at 1:08 | history | edited | j_foster | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Added a better example based on comment suggestions.
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| Oct 12, 2015 at 23:27 | comment | added | Faraz Masroor | I had a friend of mine in French class who didn't get the difference between the j in 'jam' (which doesn't happen in French) versus the j in the french word 'je'. | |
| Oct 12, 2015 at 15:31 | comment | added | alephzero | As a native British English speaker, I have no problem hearing the difference between "seize" and "cease", which seems the same as the "sauce/measure" example. | |
| Oct 12, 2015 at 15:14 | comment | added | Todd Wilcox | To clarify a bit, in US English, "l" is always pronounced with the tongue touching the back of the top teeth and/or the upper palate. Source On the other hand, the American "r" is never pronounced with the tongue touching the teeth or palate. Source The Japanese "r" is palatized (not lingual-dental), meaning it actually sounds more like an American "l" than an American "r". The British "r" can be palatized or not, or dropped, depending on accent and location in a word. | |
| Oct 12, 2015 at 14:48 | comment | added | anomaly | Native English speakers would have no problem distinguishing /s/ from /ʒ/. On the other hand, /k/ and /kʰ/ are allophones in English, and it is generally difficult for native speakers to distinguish or reproduce them consistently in, say, learning Mandarin. It's not too hard in slow, careful speech, though. On the other hand, I find it very hard to differentiate Polish /ɕ/ and /ʂ/ in any setting at all. In the opposite direction, the /pʷ/ or /pw/ in 'pueblo' is easy to recognize and pronounce for most native English speakers, despite only appearing in loan words. | |
| Oct 12, 2015 at 13:14 | comment | added | Araucaria - Not here any more. | Brilliant answer - apart from your last paragraph, which doesn't live up to the rest. The question is about sounds and not spelling. And us native speakers have no problem distinguishing the /s/ and /ʒ/. Consider lesser and leisure which are different apart from these two sounds. If you remove this bit I can upvote your post!!! | |
| Oct 12, 2015 at 10:27 | comment | added | Steve Jessop | Native speakers of English frequently don't notice the difference between including or omitting a linking "r" in (otherwise) non-rhotic accents. When I say "don't notice", I mean non-rhotic speakers can detect it if we carefully listen for it but general speech is completely comprehensible whether it's there or not ["theah or not" vs "theah-ror not"] and we won't necessarily remember which way it was said just moments afterwards. Even if we're the one saying it. When it becomes a marker of prestige accents it might be more noticeable, prestige is "meaningful" ;-) | |
| Oct 12, 2015 at 9:43 | comment | added | ClickRick | Your example of the 's' is not the most pronounced difference by a long chalk. Look instead at the difference between the first 'l' and the second in the word "little" and you will have something more subtle, something which most people wouldn't normally consider, and which makes less difference, but the two sounds are different (for many speakers, anyway - some would say "littel" and make them say the same, but that sounds odd to my ears). Then take that and compare it to "litter" (standard English pronunciation rather than US so the 'r' is omitted) and your answer could become better. | |
| Oct 12, 2015 at 5:21 | comment | added | Joe | In fact, if someone pronounced sauce as /ʒɔs/ "zhoss" and measure as /mɛsr/ "messer", I think you would not only notice immediately that the pronunciations were wrong, but you might not even know which words they meant. Switching /s/ and /ʒ/ is definitely a significant change in English. | |
| Oct 12, 2015 at 3:01 | comment | added | curiousdannii | English speakers can definitely and easy distinguish between /s/ and /ʒ/, such as 'loose' vs 'luge'. There are two differences, the voicing and the place of articulation. | |
| Oct 12, 2015 at 3:01 | comment | added | Peter Olson | I think the difference between "s in sauce" and "s in measure" isn't a very good example, since /s/ and /ʒ/ are distinct phonemes in English, and the fact that they are both spelled with "s" is just an artifact of the orthography, and not really representative of the underlying phonology (the "s" in "measure" is also the "g" in "genre" and "z" in "azure"). I think a better example of what English speakers would have trouble distinguishing would be the unaspirated /k/ in "skip" and the aspirated /kʰ/ in "kill", since they are allophones in English. | |
| Oct 12, 2015 at 1:31 | comment | added | shin | Variations in pronunciation may be considered as a 'spice' of language. I remember encountering various people pronouncing the word 'vase' differently. Some use /vähs/, others, /veys/. People still understand through context and context clues. | |
| Oct 12, 2015 at 1:08 | history | answered | j_foster | CC BY-SA 3.0 |