Drills and Tests in English Sounds [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION This book is based on the modern view that the sounds of a language are signifieant only when they contrast with each other: i.e., when the substitution of one sound for another in otherwise the same utterance produces a change of meaning. For example, in English, i: (the vowel sound in seat) and i (that in sit) are two signifieant sounds, because if you put i: in p-k you get a different meaning from the one you get if you put i there (the difference is that between peak and pick). In French, on the contrary, whether you put i: or i in p-k does not change the meaning (pique), although one sounds more familiar to a Frenchman than the other. In Hindi phal (with aspirated p, or p with a puff of air after it) is different in meaning from pal, with unaspirated p. In English, on the contrary, it makes no difference whether you put aspirated or unaspirated p before -ael; you still get the word pal, although one version sounds more familiar than the other. English insult with the stress on the first syllable is a noun, but insult with the stress on the second is a verb. No such stress contrasts are possible in, for instance, Czech and Hungárián. Different languages have thus different contrasts between sounds. If two languages happen to make the same contrasts between a certain pair of sounds, it will be easier for speakers of one of the languages to learn that contrast in the other: for instance, both English and Germán have a contrast between n (the last sound in sin) and q (the last sound in sing). In Germán a pair such as Bann and hang provides an example of this contrast. But Spanish does not have this contrast: there is no pair of words in that language that differ in meaning solely because n occurs in one in the place where Q occurs in the other. Spanish students will therefore have difficulty in learning the n-g contrast in English, whereas Germán students will not. A trained phonetician with experience of the problems of learning the pronunciation of a foreign language can forecast the difficulties a teacher will meet in teaching the pronunciation of Language A to students whose own language is Language B by making an analysis of the sound system of each language and then comparing these ix