phonology is phun

Once you're a speech-language pathologist, you always are, I guess.  You can imagine that having so many English-as-a-second-(or fifth)-language speakers around, I'd be having a blast figuring out what was going on with everyone's speech as they applied the sound system (phonology) of their own language to English. 

Mostly I was just jealous, since one of the great tragedies of my existence is that I absolutely cannot roll an [r].  Never have been able to.  And not for a lack of trying over the course of my rather extensive number of years on this planet.  Try as I might, it just sounds like a cat hacking up a furball.  Or gargling.  Or something that's not the smooth, exotic, flair-ridden speech that pretty much everyone who isn't American (or Canadian, sorry Tahir!) on the team enjoyed.  And, since I had Felipe, Imane and Sheela on my project team, with their ridiculously delightful rolling [r]s flying all over the place continuously, I had to have my nose rubbed in my own distinct inadequacy pretty much every other syllable for a month of endless conversations.

Sigh.

Nonetheless, I was pretty good at identifying the substitutions that any non-native speaker will make when speaking a different language.  Of course, they varied depending on who was doing the speaking.  I was good at imitating some of them too.  Trust me when I say I had a bunch of fun imitating my face off.  (Since we were doing a strategy project, I pretty much never said the commonly-needed word VISION with a [v])  But I could not for the life of me create the trills or the huge number of non-English sounds produced at the palatal, velar, uvula, or pharyngeal places of articulation (back of the mouth and throat for you non-linguist readers out there).  Those I couldn't even hear the differences among, let alone produce.  It was straight to a hacking, gargling cat.  I was mortified.  I probably should be stripped of my linguistics tiara.  (but I'll fight to the death to keep it!)

A couple of times I helped one of my colleagues produce an item using the standard English phonemes.  But then that made me sad because it lost that awesome, exotic, trilling and flapping flair.  It just sounded flat and boring, kinda like how I talk.  Well, that's not fun at all.  Stopped doing that pretty much as soon as I started and developed an attitude problem about speech therapy for accent reduction besides.

Sigh.

See?  I'm totally not making it up - here's 8 phonetic inventories!

On our next-to-last day, I had a little break while my colleagues were finishing up some stuff before a team review.  And then I really geeked out, linguistics style.  I decided to write the phonetic inventories (a listing of all sounds) in all the languages represented by our team.  What a super-radical fun thing to do!  (if you're reading this and thinking, yeah, that's about as much fun as filling a salt shaker with a teeny pair of tweezers... well then, you seriously need to re-evaluate your notion of fun, my friend).  So here's what I learned:

1.  I mapped 8 languages:  Japanese, Malayalam, Hindi-Urdu, Mandarin, Arabic, English, Spanish, and German.  The Indians got 2 languages, just because they're special.

2.  These 8 languages include a total of 59 consonant sounds.

3.  These 8 languages only share 11 sounds (isn't that amazing??!?!?):  [b], [p], [t], [d], [k], [g], [m], [n], [s], [l] and [j] (this is the "y" sound in "yellow").  Six of these are stops (produced by stopping airflow then releasing, they're the first 6 in the list just before this sentence). 

4.  Arabic has more sounds than English and many of them are produced at the back of the mouth and throat.  Spanish and Malayalam also share the trilled [r].  (jealous!)

5.  Malayalam also has a lot of sounds produced at the back of the mouth, especially those released through the nose (nasals).  English only has 3 nasals - Malayalam has 6!

6.  German and Arabic are the only of our 8 languages that have sounds produced at the uvula (that dangly thing at the back of the throat). 

7.  German has some interesting things going on with affricates (example is "ch" sound in English) but I'd have to study the whole thing some more to figure out what.  I do know I gave Stephan a hard time about his affricates, poor thing!

8.  Mandarin has surprisingly few consonants and vowels in comparison to the others.  This makes sense since it's a tonal language, but actually looking up the phonetic inventory really made this hit home.

9.  I couldn't even guess what to do with my tongue to make some of these sounds, in spite of knowing the anatomy.  Just trying to figure it out for a couple of German and Malayalam sounds knotted my brain so much I was rendered catatonic.

So, I'm sure there's way more to know here but, as I mentioned, it was a SHORT break before we reviewed our final client presentation.  Do you see what a team player I am???  I shortcircuited my own pressing, encompassing inquiry in the name of team collaboration.  Whew.  How global I'm becoming.

The bottom line for me?  English is boring.  I need to learn another language.  And somehow, some way, I gotta figure out how to roll an [r].  #ibmcsc uae