A linguistic moment

[solarbird]

So I was helping some people the other day try to pronounce a Japanese name that they'd seen written in English letters; they we trying to figure it out and applying US English pronunciation and of course knew that was wrong, but didn't know what to do. So I pronounced it correctly for them a few times, but they needed it broken down into syllables, which I did a couple of times, but their attempts to repeat back to me confused me, and someone else came up anyway, so I needed it spelt for me again.

And the new person spelt it in chunks, and it broke my brain, and the word fell out, so I asked him to repeat it, and he did the same thing, and I kept trying to make him stop, because the way he was doing it was breaking my ability to process it, somehow, and it took several tries until I could get him to stop pausing mid-word and then it stayed.

And only after I left did I figure out that what he was doing was breaking letters in half. Obviously he wasn't doing this in English - he was using whole letters - but he was in Japanese, by using English letters and pausing after consonants, in ways you just can't in Japanese. They stop being phoenic base elements, or letters at all, and become a linguistically unqualifyable element - and in my head just disappear, apparently.

It felt a lot like I was suddenly off my memory meds. The disappearance effect was strikingly similar.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

So, wait. What I hear you saying is your internal linguistic engine... is Asian in nature?

How very interesting....

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

or at least her japanese parser is japanese in its construction :)

[solarbird]

What she said. My English parser is English in nature. It's the conflict between the two that made the collision in the way I felt it be possible. Otherwise it couldn't have had the super-low-level fail it had.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

yeah, it breaks down the japanese phoneme. just like if someone tried to spell "b" for you by going something like "m p" -- it just doesn't work out like that. (english often uses "mb" for the next prevoiced consonant over, in case you're wondering where that example came from.)

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

If you watch a lot of anime or subtitled Japanese movies you get an intuitive feel for the language even if you don't know what the words are or any of the official rules. (Same for any language, actually.) I imagine actually learning greatly strengthens this. So when someone tries pronouncing Japanese using non-Japanese rules, it doesn't parse.

I know very little Japanese but hearing British and US pronunciations of Japanese words still sounds wrong. Thanks to my large anime collection. :-)