je m'appelle l'amour.

Sawubona. (Zulu, South Africa)



So take a look at this clip from Episode 5, Season 2 of Family Guy, and take note of the African adopted child:

Family Guy: Love Thy Trophy


"*click click* Stewwwie!"


This "click" phonetic featured is called a click consonant, which can be found among many languages of Southern Africa, including Zulu.

According to Wiki, "There are three basic clicks in Zulu":

c - dental (comparable to a sucking of teeth)
q - alveolar (comparable to a bottle top 'pop')
x - lateral (comparable to a click one may do for a walking horse)


Apparently with all the variations (like voiced, aspirated), Zulu has about 15 different clicks.



Yeah so the reason I bring this up is because I noticed how some English speakers use "clicks" to express hesitation.

Ok. French Conversation class. We are all presenting a French news article. This one girl talks about her topic-- and then at one point, she stops to look at the article to remind herself of some quantitative details of the news. While she looks, she does a sequence of some sort of lateral click. Here's how it was like:

"And so the total number of injured people was---(looks at paper, and simultaneously:) *click click click*-- oh, 500 people."


I'm sure you've heard this sort of expression before. I think I do more of a dental click in that situation. Or an airy whistle.

Oh, isn't the sound of disapproval, "tsk tsk tsk" dental clicks as well?

Well, since some languages do treat clicks as phonemes, I wonder if we can call it one here, too. It's kind of an equivalent of the discourse marker "ummmmm" or "uhhhhhh," except I think the clicks only appear when the speaker is physically looking for linguistic detail. The hesitation is physical, not mental.

My theory is that when you are physically looking for something on paper, you are aware that you are making the listener(s) wait. So to fill in the silence during the wait, we produce these near-musical sounds. It's like when you're put on hold on the phone-- "Please wait while we connect you to the operator... *elevator music*"

If a linguist were to transcribe a conversation which contains *click click click*, would he take note of it as equally as he would with "You know," or "Err"?

I wonder how many English speakers actually use this clicking expression, anyway. At least two people in my French Convo class do.

I further wonder if speakers of other languages do this as well. I don't think I've heard Japanese monolinguals use it... they would say "eeeeeeeh" or "eeeeeeeeeto." But who knows, some might.



Hm, something to think about.

SOD:



Lacy knee-high socks, black. Made in Japan.

Marhaba. (Arabic; Middle East)

Oh, unrelated to this entry but related to the greeting-- in Swahili, when you greet an elder, you say "Shikamoo." The elder responds with, "Marahaba." As you can see, Swahili borrows Arabic words.



In my French literature class the other day, we were discussing Jean de la Fontaine's fable poetry. His poems consist of two parts: the illustration of the fable, and the moral of the story. Our professor called them le coeur (the heart, the core) and l'âme (the spirit) of the poem, respectively. Everyone in the class scurried to write those terms down.

I then casually glanced at my neighbor's notes. Sorry, I wasn't trying to be nosy. But what she had written caught my eyes:

le corps & l'homme


...'the body and the man.'

I first doubted myself and thought, "Did I hear him wrong?" But neh... the prof said it again, and it was confirmed: SHE heard it wrong.

What he said:

le coeur [lə kœʀ]
l'âme [lɑm]

What she heard:

le corps [lə kɔʀ]
l'homme [lɔm]


I can kind of see where she got it, but where is this tendency to hear the vowels as a mid-back vowel /ɔ/coming from?!


I would maaaybe understand if it were two rounded back vowels or something... for example,

l'amour [lamuʀ]

and

la mort [la mɔʀ]


Those two are so hard to distinguish, saying and hearing. I remember I spent about 5 minutes with my French teacher last semester repeating the two words until I recognized the distinction. lawl.


Oh, I didn't say anything to my neighbor about her error.... hee.


SOCKS OF THE DAY WOO



Cotton piano print ankle socks, teal. Made in Japan. My casual socks to go with sneakers and such... so what if you can't see them. Socks must be cool always.

Zdravo. (Bosnian)

I think I've been forgetting my routine greetings. Oops. And it would probably help if I put what language it's in, wouldn't it.


Anyway FC2 Blog was down for a while, now it's back. But it looks like they deleted half of my earlier entries... I need to restore that somehow. Poop.



So in a previous blog entry (one of the deleted ones...), I discussed how it's difficult for Japanese people (including myself) to distinguish the affricate [dʒ] (as in "jello") from the fricative [ʒ] (as in "measure").

Another sound that I have a frustratingly hard time hearing: [j].

In IPA 'j' is not the J as in "janky." It's the Y sound as in Yoda. It's called a palatal glide/approximant.

More specifically, it's not [j] on its own, my problem's when it's followed by a high front vowel like [jɪ] or [ji]. Think "yi" and "yee," respectively. I have more problem hearing the latter.


There was an unsolved mystery within my head for quite a while, until about 2 years ago: Why do we say "an ear" but not "an year"?

You may laugh if you're not Japanese... but I'm serious, "year" sounds like "ear" to me. So for the longest time, I could not figure out why people said "a year."

When I finally confronted a friend two years (two ears?) ago, and I confused the hell out of him. "Year is not the same as ear!"

Then, I figured it out:

Ear [ɪəɹ]

Year [jɪəɹ]


Oooh, the "yuh" sound is still there in "year"...



So FYI, the "yi" sound [ji] doesn't exist in Japanese; neither does "ye" [jɛ].


Funny though, I can hear [je], considering that I can say "yes." Oh yes I can.


See, when Japanese borrows the sound [ji] from English, it turns into [i]. In the same scenario, [je] turns into [ie].


Oh, I just figured out why I can hear "yes." Because [je] sounds like [ie] in Japanese, whereas the approximant [j] itself is dropped in the adaptation of [ji]. Substitution versus elimination, hmmm.


Ok so my small epiphany aside, I can't really hear the difference between "ear" and "year" unless you really emphasize it. And it's because the sound doesn't exist in Japanese. Furthermore, when borrowed, "yee" turns into "ee" in Japanese.

Year [jɪəɹ] --> イアー [ia:] ("iaa") or more commonly *イヤー　[ija:] ("iyaa")

*Interesting how [əɹ] is adapted with an approximant [ja], hm... must be [i] and [a] fusing to form [ja].

My spoken English is accent-free, but there are a few, slight "accents" that still kick in because of my bilingualism.

I'm probably not pronouncing "year" correctly either, but it's such a small difference it doesn't even matter.... or does it.


An ear of corn, or a year of corn.


The second one sounds like corn hell.

Bonjour.

A slight update, I may be taking Arabic instead of Swahili next semester. I didn't even know Swahili was so popular. I'll see what happens.
Anyway, the gist of an interesting miscommunication I experienced sometime recently:

Me: So I have this facial lotion that's has high SPF and immortelle flower extract, which is supposed to be good for anti-aging purposes for your skin.
Friend: Anti-what?
Me: Anti-aging. It reverses the aging process.
Friend: The Asian process?
Me: Anti-aging?
Friend: Anti-Asian? Like, scare off Asians? That's terrible.
Me: ???


*Everything in [brackets] is International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) notation.

The deal was, I failed to pronounce the voiced postalveolar affricate, [dʒ], in "aging." I kept on pronouncing it as a voiced postalveolar fricative, [ʒ].

The affricate would be like... the "j" sound in 'giraffe.' Notice how you stop the airstream completely before releasing the sound. Like a "d" followed by a "j." [dʒɨɹæf].

The fricative would be like...the "j" sound in 'usually.' You make an almost complete obstruction of the vocal tract with a fricative. Almost. Air escapes through a small opening, which produces a "hissing" turbulent noise.



Ok, so I have a hard time distinguishing when to use each one of these. I can hear the differences when pronounced; I know that they are different consonant sounds. But I have trouble deciding which one to use, say, when I'm writing out the IPA transcription of "giraffe" for a Phonetics homework. [dʒɨɹæf]? [ʒɨɹæf]? They both sound right to me.

Well I thought I was pronouncing words with affricates/fricatives correctly by instinct, even though I couldn't explicitly identify them.

WRONG.

So obviously I've lately realized that to some extent, affricates are incorrectly replaced with fricatives in my set of vocabulary in my head.

I was perceived as saying "Asian" [eɪʒən], but I swear I thought I was saying "aging" [eɪdʒɪŋ]. I swear. I guess physically I was saying [eɪʒɪŋ], which sounds a lot like [eɪʒən].

Thus, anti-Asian cream.


Last semester in Intro to Linguistics, I was frustrated that I didn't naturally know when to use affricates instead of fricatives. (It's just the voiced, too... I could figure out the voiceless, e.g. "ch" [tʃ] vs. "sh" [ʃ].)

So I explored a bit on the reason behind it, mainly to convince myself that I'm not crazy.

And I concluded that it was because my first language is Japanese. I came up with some pretty crazy reasoning when I first encountered this phenomenon. Of course I was only a few weeks into Linguistics. It did have some accurate intuition, though, I think. I've cleaned up my argument a bit below, for this blog entry's purpose.

Ready?

There are two symbols (kanas) for "ji" in Japanese: じand ぢ. Now that I pay attention to phonetics, I think they're both predominantly pronounced as [dʒi]. I say "predominantly" because they can be pronounced [ʒi] as well. The affricate is in free variation with the fricative...and this applies to both the kanas. (Simply put, the homophones じ and ぢ can be pronounced either as affricates or fricatives). Though the affricate pronunciation is prevalent, I think IPA notation is usually [ʒi], the fricative. Weird.

Ok, here's what I think:

I speculate that じ used to be pronounced solely as a fricative, and ぢsolely as an affricate. So affricates and fricatives used to be allophones (can't occur in the same environment)? I think we lost the distinction over time, and the pair became free-variations of one another?

Here's how I got the idea:

じ([ʒi]) is the voiced form of し, "shi" [ʃi]. See that the two kanas' shapes are the same, except for with the two dots? The dots (daku-on, it's called) indicate that the dotted kana is the voiced form of the original kana. So, しis undoubtedly pronounced as a fricative. So then, じshould technically be a voiced fricative, as it is marked.

So then...look at this: ち、ぢ.

ちis pronounced "chi" [tʃi]. If you recall what I noted earlier, [tʃ] is a voiceless affricate. So going with the voicing rule above, ち with the dots, ぢ, should be pronounced "dji" [dʒi]. The voiced affricate.



Is anyone still with me?

So my conclusion is, since (at least according to my hypothesis and "evidence") affricates and fricatives lost their contrast over time in Japanese, I have a hard time differentiating them in English.


Let me add a feedback from Prof. Shigeto Kawahara of the Department of Linguistics at Rutgers University:

"The pairs [in question]...are notoriously difficult for Japanese speakers--even I can't make a distinction very well. ...Japanese did have a contrast between fricatives and affricates in voiced alveolar and palatal consonants, but now we lost it.

A traditional description suggested that we have affricates word-initially and fricatives between vowels (so [dzoo] 'elephant' but [indo-zoo]). However, recent phonetic studies suggest that this is not a really a categorical distinction, but rather a distributional skew, as Ai's intuition suggests.

This 'near-allophonic' relationship makes the perception of the contrast hard to hear [for Japanese people]."



Yeah? Yeah?

My former Linguistics teacher suggests that though I'm a native English speaker, something like an accent could have set in during my first two years of acquiring English, revealing this slight difficulty.

Additional note... as far as I know, the voiced postalveolar affricate doesn't exist in French. So 'je' is pronounced [ʒə], never [dʒə]. Maybe that's why I do well speaking French. Because it's always the fricative.


So yes. Please do not be offended when I mistakenly put on my "Anti-Asian" cream. I love Asians, really.