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What’s the minimum number of phonemes you could use in English and still be understood, even if you’d easily be clocked as having a foreign accent? I bet you co

What’s the minimum number of phonemes you could use in English and still be understood, even if you’d easily be clocked as having a foreign accent? I bet you could get it under 40.

lolinder 2y ago
The definition of a phoneme is that there exists some pair of words that are only distinguishable because of a difference in that specific sound (called 'minimal pairs'). As a trivial example: "hat" and "bat" => /h/ and /b/ are phonemes. A more complicated example: "teeth" and "teethe" => /θ/ (voiceless th) and /ð/ (voiced th) are phonemes. We have many other sound variants—phones [0]—which are important to get right if you want to not have an accent but which aren't actually used to distinguish one word from another. Pairs of these are called allophones [1], and probably the easiest example to think of in English is all the many ways we pronounce /t/. What this definition means is that you can't get it under 40 if your goal is to be understood 100% of the time. We have 40-49 sounds (depending on accent) that are used to distinguish words, and if you don't have one of those in your toolbox then you will occasionally be misunderstood. You could probably select a few that make it unlikely to come up often (/θ/ and /ð/ are good candidates), but you could also likely do the same for any other language, Navajo included. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_(phonetics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_(phonetics) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > What this definition means is that you can't get it under 40 if your goal is to be understood 100% of the time. That isn't really right; you can go below 40 without making any detectible dent in how often you're understood. That would cause problems if you only ever spoke in single-word utterances, but if you did that, no one would understand you anyway. People blame a lot of communication problems on pronunciation when they actually arise from other sources. I once asked a student at an English-immersion school whether a particular class was happening that day, and was confused by his answer of "poss". When he clarified "stop", I was able to guess what he meant, and he got upset and asked whether the difference between "poss" and "pause" was really so important to English speakers. It isn't; the problem is that you can't use "pause" to refer to the one-off cancellation of a periodic event. If you're using the word appropriately and you can't pronounce /z/, no one is ever going to be confused, not least because there is no word /pɑs/ to be confused about. But if you can't pronounce English and you can't speak it either, people will be confused when you try to say things. Trying to work on your pronunciation is absolutely the wrong approach to that problem; if you get it up to being flawless, most of the confusion you were struggling with will still occur.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > That isn't really right; you can go below 40 without making any detectible dent in how often you're understood. That would cause problems if you only ever spoke in single-word utterances I meant 100% literally. You can drop below 100% and still not have a detectable dent in understanding, and I even suggest a few phonemes that would make it extremely unlikely to come up. The fact remains that phonemes are definitionally sounds that can cause confusion if you combine them or drop them, and to arrive at the set of phonemes we already dropped dozens of other sounds that a native speaker would use in certain contexts but that are understandable if you mix them up. And the fact also remains that if you apply the drop-phonemes-and-see-if-people-understand-you technique to other languages you can reduce their number of phonemes as well, which makes the whole exercise kind of pointless in the context of trying to judge relative difficulties of phonologies. The definition of phoneme that we use isn't some sort of natural category, but it is what it is because other definitions would be even more arbitrary and less useful.
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      > I meant 100% literally. You can drop below 100% and still not have a detectable dent in understanding, and I even suggest a few phonemes that would make it extremely unlikely to come up. Combining /θ/ and /ð/ will mean that it never comes up, not even once, unless you intentionally force the issue by using a sentence like "we saw her teeth" that positions the word in a context where it's not clear whether it's a noun or a verb. In most cases that can't be done, as witnessed by the fact that English nouns regularly zero-derive into verbs - for the zero-derivation to work, you have to be able to tell the difference between a noun and a verb even though they're pronounced identically. On the other hand, you can't actually have meant 100% literally, because that's not an achievable goal. No native speaker can reach a 100% rate of being understood. But a foreign speaker can easily achieve a rate of being understood equal to that of a native speaker while dropping some of the English phonemic inventory. > And the fact also remains that if you apply the drop-phonemes-and-see-if-people-understand-you technique to other languages you can reduce their number of phonemes as well That's true, but the question I saw was just "how many phonemes could you drop from English while still being understood?". And the answer is that English, like every other language, features a lot of redundancy; many things can go wrong before you stop being understood, but every time you do get something wrong, your odds get a bit worse. The amount of slack you have in terms of phonemes depends on how good you are with the rest of the language.
- philwelch 2y ago
  > The definition of a phoneme is that there exists some pair of words that are only distinguishable because of a difference in that specific sound (called 'minimal pairs'). As a trivial example: "hat" and "bat" => /h/ and /b/ are phonemes. Okay, what about “cot” and “caught”? In some English dialects those are distinct phonemes, while in other dialects they are not. Yet someone who speaks a dialect without the cot-caught merger can still understand someone who speaks a dialect with the merger, even in the rare case that they use the words “cot” and “caught”, probably because you would never sleep on a caught or say that you cot a cold. Surely the “caught” vowel is one of the nine phonemes between 40 and 49, but I’m arguing that if you can drop nine whole phonemes and still remain mutually intelligible, you could probably drop a couple more and still be understood. For instance, while it isn’t any standard native dialect, Elmer Fudd’s “r/w” merger, while rendering him an object of ridicule, doesn’t seem to impede his intelligibility.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Conceded. I'd assumed you were trying to figure out if English really had about as complicated a phonology as Navajo, and fiddling about with dropping phonemes isn't a useful approach for that because you could apply it to Navajo just as easily if you knew Navajo. If you get American English down to 35 I'd assume you could also get Navajo down to 40 by the same processes. But yes, you can drop phonemes and be understood from other context as long as there is other context (which there usually is).
    - philwelch 2y ago
      I don't know if you could get Navajo down by the same amount though. English speakers are accustomed to dealing with a wide variety of dialects so the language is clearly well adapted to sloppy and inconsistent phonology. Is the same true of Navajo, or are Navajo speakers accustomed to a more limited and consistent set of dialects? I don't know and I'm not really trying to argue a point here, it's just something to ponder.

What’s the minimum number of phonemes you could use in English and still be understood, even if you’d easily be clocked as having a foreign accent? I bet you could get it under 40.

lolinder 2y ago

The definition of a phoneme is that there exists some pair of words that are only distinguishable because of a difference in that specific sound (called 'minimal pairs'). As a trivial example: "hat" and "bat" => /h/ and /b/ are phonemes. A more complicated example: "teeth" and "teethe" => /θ/ (voiceless th) and /ð/ (voiced th) are phonemes. We have many other sound variants—phones [0]—which are important to get right if you want to not have an accent but which aren't actually used to distinguish one word from another. Pairs of these are called allophones [1], and probably the easiest example to think of in English is all the many ways we pronounce /t/. What this definition means is that you can't get it under 40 if your goal is to be understood 100% of the time. We have 40-49 sounds (depending on accent) that are used to distinguish words, and if you don't have one of those in your toolbox then you will occasionally be misunderstood. You could probably select a few that make it unlikely to come up often (/θ/ and /ð/ are good candidates), but you could also likely do the same for any other language, Navajo included. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_(phonetics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_(phonetics) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone

thaumasiotes 2y ago
> What this definition means is that you can't get it under 40 if your goal is to be understood 100% of the time. That isn't really right; you can go below 40 without making any detectible dent in how often you're understood. That would cause problems if you only ever spoke in single-word utterances, but if you did that, no one would understand you anyway. People blame a lot of communication problems on pronunciation when they actually arise from other sources. I once asked a student at an English-immersion school whether a particular class was happening that day, and was confused by his answer of "poss". When he clarified "stop", I was able to guess what he meant, and he got upset and asked whether the difference between "poss" and "pause" was really so important to English speakers. It isn't; the problem is that you can't use "pause" to refer to the one-off cancellation of a periodic event. If you're using the word appropriately and you can't pronounce /z/, no one is ever going to be confused, not least because there is no word /pɑs/ to be confused about. But if you can't pronounce English and you can't speak it either, people will be confused when you try to say things. Trying to work on your pronunciation is absolutely the wrong approach to that problem; if you get it up to being flawless, most of the confusion you were struggling with will still occur.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > That isn't really right; you can go below 40 without making any detectible dent in how often you're understood. That would cause problems if you only ever spoke in single-word utterances I meant 100% literally. You can drop below 100% and still not have a detectable dent in understanding, and I even suggest a few phonemes that would make it extremely unlikely to come up. The fact remains that phonemes are definitionally sounds that can cause confusion if you combine them or drop them, and to arrive at the set of phonemes we already dropped dozens of other sounds that a native speaker would use in certain contexts but that are understandable if you mix them up. And the fact also remains that if you apply the drop-phonemes-and-see-if-people-understand-you technique to other languages you can reduce their number of phonemes as well, which makes the whole exercise kind of pointless in the context of trying to judge relative difficulties of phonologies. The definition of phoneme that we use isn't some sort of natural category, but it is what it is because other definitions would be even more arbitrary and less useful.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    > I meant 100% literally. You can drop below 100% and still not have a detectable dent in understanding, and I even suggest a few phonemes that would make it extremely unlikely to come up. Combining /θ/ and /ð/ will mean that it never comes up, not even once, unless you intentionally force the issue by using a sentence like "we saw her teeth" that positions the word in a context where it's not clear whether it's a noun or a verb. In most cases that can't be done, as witnessed by the fact that English nouns regularly zero-derive into verbs - for the zero-derivation to work, you have to be able to tell the difference between a noun and a verb even though they're pronounced identically. On the other hand, you can't actually have meant 100% literally, because that's not an achievable goal. No native speaker can reach a 100% rate of being understood. But a foreign speaker can easily achieve a rate of being understood equal to that of a native speaker while dropping some of the English phonemic inventory. > And the fact also remains that if you apply the drop-phonemes-and-see-if-people-understand-you technique to other languages you can reduce their number of phonemes as well That's true, but the question I saw was just "how many phonemes could you drop from English while still being understood?". And the answer is that English, like every other language, features a lot of redundancy; many things can go wrong before you stop being understood, but every time you do get something wrong, your odds get a bit worse. The amount of slack you have in terms of phonemes depends on how good you are with the rest of the language.
philwelch 2y ago
> The definition of a phoneme is that there exists some pair of words that are only distinguishable because of a difference in that specific sound (called 'minimal pairs'). As a trivial example: "hat" and "bat" => /h/ and /b/ are phonemes. Okay, what about “cot” and “caught”? In some English dialects those are distinct phonemes, while in other dialects they are not. Yet someone who speaks a dialect without the cot-caught merger can still understand someone who speaks a dialect with the merger, even in the rare case that they use the words “cot” and “caught”, probably because you would never sleep on a caught or say that you cot a cold. Surely the “caught” vowel is one of the nine phonemes between 40 and 49, but I’m arguing that if you can drop nine whole phonemes and still remain mutually intelligible, you could probably drop a couple more and still be understood. For instance, while it isn’t any standard native dialect, Elmer Fudd’s “r/w” merger, while rendering him an object of ridicule, doesn’t seem to impede his intelligibility.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Conceded. I'd assumed you were trying to figure out if English really had about as complicated a phonology as Navajo, and fiddling about with dropping phonemes isn't a useful approach for that because you could apply it to Navajo just as easily if you knew Navajo. If you get American English down to 35 I'd assume you could also get Navajo down to 40 by the same processes. But yes, you can drop phonemes and be understood from other context as long as there is other context (which there usually is).
  - philwelch 2y ago
    I don't know if you could get Navajo down by the same amount though. English speakers are accustomed to dealing with a wide variety of dialects so the language is clearly well adapted to sloppy and inconsistent phonology. Is the same true of Navajo, or are Navajo speakers accustomed to a more limited and consistent set of dialects? I don't know and I'm not really trying to argue a point here, it's just something to ponder.