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> 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

> 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.

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.