3 ms·

> so an Ephraimites soldier was literally incapable of pronouncing the word "correctly". And, importantly, they would not even have realized that they were say

> so an Ephraimites soldier was literally incapable of pronouncing the word "correctly". And, importantly, they would not even have realized that they were saying it wrong, because they would have been unable to hear the difference. As a modern example: I have an acquaintance from Tonga. At some point she got very frustrated with the people around her who didn't understand what she meant by the "rittel bin". She finally pointed at the trash can. "Oh, the litter bin!" "That's what I said, the rittel bin!" In Tongan, l and r are the same phoneme, and native speakers cannot distinguish them without practice.

dustincoates 3y ago
I learned French as an adult, and I cannot at all hear the difference between the words "rue" and "roue." People tell me there's a difference and they try to sound it out to me, but each time they do, I just have to trust that they aren't saying the same thing twice.
- eszed 3y ago
  There are native-English dialect groups which make no distinction between the vowels in 'pin' and 'pen'. For all I rib my wife about falling on the other side of that line, it took my American ear a long time to hear UK-dialect(s) distinctions between 'Mary', 'merry', and 'marry', and still a fair bit of concentration to reproduce them!
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    The mary/marry/merry split is in America too. I say them all differently.
perlgeek 3y ago
Another famous example of l and r confusion is Japanese. One I'm struggling with: Norwegian (bokmal at least) has the "y", which is between i and the German ü. I can kinda hear the difference, if I pay close attention and the speaker is deliberate about the pronounciation, but saying it is kinda hard, and I get it wrong most of the time.
mekoka 3y ago
It's not that you're unable to hear the difference, you have to pay closer attention to what you're really hearing. I'm a native french speaker and when first learning english, I was made to carefully notice the subtle difference in certain vowels, intonations, silent consonants, etc. Like in sit and seat. The former vowel doesn't exist in french, so most french speakers learning english would pronounce it like the latter, as in "seat down". English vowels are very different from french, but there are some similarities and if you don't care to notice, you'll use approximations. E.g. imagine a french person saying "book", with the "ooh" sound and a noticeable exhalation after the k. Small little things like that can be brought to attention and corrected. It also doesn't help that we much rely on the written word to learn. Which reinforces the reliance on existing symbol-pronunciation associations, instead of creating new ones.
interroboink 3y ago
Somewhat similar to how English (and other) speakers can have trouble distinguishing between the intonations in tonal languages like Chinese — "mā, má, mǎ, mà", and all that.

dustincoates 3y ago

I learned French as an adult, and I cannot at all hear the difference between the words "rue" and "roue." People tell me there's a difference and they try to sound it out to me, but each time they do, I just have to trust that they aren't saying the same thing twice.

eszed 3y ago
There are native-English dialect groups which make no distinction between the vowels in 'pin' and 'pen'. For all I rib my wife about falling on the other side of that line, it took my American ear a long time to hear UK-dialect(s) distinctions between 'Mary', 'merry', and 'marry', and still a fair bit of concentration to reproduce them!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nerdponx 3y ago
  The mary/marry/merry split is in America too. I say them all differently.

perlgeek 3y ago

Another famous example of l and r confusion is Japanese. One I'm struggling with: Norwegian (bokmal at least) has the "y", which is between i and the German ü. I can kinda hear the difference, if I pay close attention and the speaker is deliberate about the pronounciation, but saying it is kinda hard, and I get it wrong most of the time.

mekoka 3y ago

It's not that you're unable to hear the difference, you have to pay closer attention to what you're really hearing. I'm a native french speaker and when first learning english, I was made to carefully notice the subtle difference in certain vowels, intonations, silent consonants, etc. Like in sit and seat. The former vowel doesn't exist in french, so most french speakers learning english would pronounce it like the latter, as in "seat down". English vowels are very different from french, but there are some similarities and if you don't care to notice, you'll use approximations. E.g. imagine a french person saying "book", with the "ooh" sound and a noticeable exhalation after the k. Small little things like that can be brought to attention and corrected. It also doesn't help that we much rely on the written word to learn. Which reinforces the reliance on existing symbol-pronunciation associations, instead of creating new ones.

interroboink 3y ago

Somewhat similar to how English (and other) speakers can have trouble distinguishing between the intonations in tonal languages like Chinese — "mā, má, mǎ, mà", and all that.