answers from a linguist

[http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert (Robert)]

Sent by Amanda Miller at 1562538135948

Hi Robert! 

I finally had a few minutes to write out answers to your questions. I had
material related to the first question in a fellowship proposal that I had
written years ago, so the answer to that question is more detailed.

 * Has there been an analysis of the most pronouncible language? 

I don’t know of such a detailed analysis, but I did
find this old paper by Peter Ladefoged, which rates the sounds of a single
language (English) with a few comparisons to other extremely different
languages (Zulu and Yoruba):

https://escholarship.org/content/qt31f5j8m7/qt31f5j8m7.pdf#page=5

You can see, that he provides values in Table II, which he notes involve a
lot of guesswork.  The paper showcases some of the types of complexity
involved in making such comparisons across languages. Most languages have
complexity on one or more different dimensions, and less complexity on
another dimension. And determining which language is
“the most pronounceable”
would be dependent on what the mother tongue of the speaker in question
is. Since, all people have difficulty learning complexities on dimensions
that are not found in their mother tongues.

The best way to compare pronunciation complexity across languages, I
think, would be to compare age of acquisition of different consonant and
vowel sounds, as well as rhythmic features, of each language by children
without any speech or hearing difficulties. and determine the average age
by which some percentage of consonants and vowels are acquired to a level
as to where they sound
“adult-like” in those
languages.

For example, click consonants are generally considered to be very
difficult to articulate, and the studies of click language acquisition in
Bantu languages like Zulu and Xhosa show that these sounds are acquired by
children late in these languages (see Herbert 1983 Kunene 1999 and Naidoo
et al. 2005) and are also acquired late by second language learners
studying these languages (Lewis 1994) (after other stop consonants like
’t’ and
‘k’. However, I believe
these results to be rather skewed by the fact that clicks are somewhat low
frequency of occurrence in the Bantu languages where they occur, compared
with the Khoisan (so called
“San” or
“Bushman” languages that I
have studied), where clicks are extremely high frequency), and where I
believe the clicks are acquired earlier, though there are no studies on
child language acquisition or second language acquisition in these smaller
click languages. There have been papers showing that order of articulation
of consonants in different languages depends on their frequency of
occurrence in words in other languages (see deBoysson-Bardies, and Vihman
1991 and Edwards, Beckman and Munson 2015 among others). So, I expect that
the simpler clicks that are extremely frequent in the Khoisan languages
are acquired earlier in those languages.

de Boysson-Bardies and Vihman (1991). Adaptation to Language: Evidence
from babbling and first words in four languages. Language 1991. 67,
297-319.

Edwards, Beckman, Munson (2015). Frequency effects in child language
acquisition. Journal of Child Language 2015 March, 42(2). 306-311.

Herbert (1983). The Relative Markedness of Click Sounds: Evidence from
Language Change, Acquisition and Avoidance, Anthropological Linguistics
32, pp. 120-138.

Kunene X. 1999. A developmental profile of speech (consonantal phonemes)
development in Zulu-speaking children between the ages of three to five
years. Unpubl. Bachelor of Speech and Hearing Therapy research report,
University of Durban-Westville.

Lewis, Phillip A. (1994). Aspects of the phonological acquisition of
clicks in Xhosa. Unpublished MA thesis, University of Stellenbosch.

Naidoo, Yugeshiree, Anita van der Merwe, Emily Groenewald, and Elise
Naude. (2005). Development of speech sounds and syllable structure of
words in Zulu-speaking children

 * Why do people speaking a non-native language have an accent?

People speaking a non-native lanuage have accents because the
articulations of the consonants and vowels, and the resulting acoustic
attributes of the consonants and vowels in those languages differ across
languages. This is extremely obvious if we compare languages like English
and Xhosa (since English doesn’t contain click
consonants at all), or languages like Hindi and English (since English
doesn’t contain retroflex consoanants), but this is
true even aciteross languages which have the supposedly
“same” speech sounds that
aren’t quite the same. For example, the
“o” in American English is
very different from the “o”
in German. Thus, Germans will have an accent speaking English, and
American English speaking people will have an accent when speaking German,
because their O sounds may sound different. There are of course also
differences, in the rhythmic aspects of languages. So, for example,
English has “stress” system
and Cantonese has a tone system, so the rhythm of the languages are quite
distinct. Second language learners of Cantonese will often produce stress
on their syllables, even if they also mange to acquire the tonal (pitch
based) aspects of the language.

Hope these answers are understandable to a non-linguist. Let me know if
they are not.

Amanda

P.S. Thanks for sending the invite to the tech history presentation -
looks interesting - I'll see how things look closer to that date.