How does one transcribe nonsense or borderline-nonsense sounds? Sounds like pfft and hmmpf seem easy to understand to me. But what about clucking sounds, for instance? Also, even pfft and hmmpf are culturally embedded. When I see those letters in front of me, I associate the sound they make with an “image” of someone making those sounds. I have a sense of what they mean and how they are used that someone from Mongolia likely doesn’t share at all. Would this Mongolian person see these same letters (non-Roman alphabet version of course) and be able to make the same sound?
Are learned (non-intuitive) systems required in order to accomplish this task? If so, are existing systems for transcribing foreign languages suitable to the task?
What role does the mind play here? I’ve heard it said that if you don’t hear certain kinds of sounds during your early childhood, it is impossible to hear them in adulthood. I’m not sure if this is considered true by people who have studied such things or not - I haven’t looked it up.
I’m just thinking out loud I guess. To some extent I’m answering my own questions just in the asking of them. But still, all thoughts are welcome.
Learned systems are required for any communication, no? Even closely-related languages (or dialects) can have different “noises” associated with the same gesture, and different gestures with the same noise. For example, in English, “bah!” is indignation or exasperation, while in Dutch it’s disgust, which is “ugh!”, “eurgh!” or “eew!” in various English dialects.
In addition, there are differences that require cultural familiarity. “Hahaha!” is different from “muahahahahaaaa”, “hee hee hee” has other connotations to “ho ho ho!” And so forth. It’s a little like cliches and idioms, they are employed not just with certain meanings but in certain situations.
Minimal pairs are words that differ by one similar sound that can’t be easily heard by people who don’t have the difference in their language. “Bier” and “beer” in Dutch sound pretty much identical to an untrained English speaker; one means “beer” and the other means “bear”. The Dutch, on the other hand, have problems differentiating “pat” and “pet”. I have spent drunken evenings trying to learn the difference between the Russian ш and щ sounds, and still haven’t got it. They’re not impossible to learn, but it takes awareness and a lot of practice. You don’t pick it up in a few hours, or a few weeks.
It’s fascinating to me that you can’t hear words spoken (in a language you understand well) as just a sound, however hard you try to divorce yourself mentally from listening rather than hearing - you always hear words. I imagine it’s for a similar reason as your mental classification of phonemes as “close enough”, as with minimal pairs.
Yes, this is a fascinating phenomenon. But I think you’re overstating it. Sometimes I do hear words as just sounds, and there’s a shock of unfamiliarity that accompanies the experience. The experience of hearing sound as just sound is brief, and of course the conceptual familiarity is there so I do snap out of it and experience the contrast. It is the contrast that is so mildly disorienting.
Good post, O_H, but I have a follow-up question: If I wanted to communicate nonsense sounds better with fellow ILP members, would it be best to invent a system that we could all use, and that we’d all have to commit to? If so, would you say this is how written language in general originally came into use? I assume not - I assume that it simply takes tens of thousands of years for a system to develop, as an ongoing interplay between organic intuition and incremental leaps of abstraction.
On a personal note, I’d love to represent a certain clucking sound using written symbols available on my keyboard. Maybe I’m insane, but it’s so frustrating that I can’t!
Do you mean buk-buk-bukaaw, or more tchok tchok tchok?
Writing began as a memory-prompt for spoken language - up until a few centuries ago (at least, in the West) even silently vocalising to oneself was a bit of a party trick. But I guess the gravity and skill demanded of the written word precluded clucks and tutting to a large extent.
“The online community”, such as it is for the English-speaking world, is already developing its own noises. “Meh” is an example of a noise that’s only recently (as far as I’m aware) been formalised into spoken, and there are more. Candidates for migration from flash-in-the-pan memes that I’ve seen are “Tchoh”, “fffffffuu-” and “gah!” none of which I’ve seen written offline. I don’t know whether you’d singlehandedly get a new noise in, it’s a bit… unorganic. Like coming up with your own nickname at school.
pfft
hmmpf
bah
ugh
eurgh
eew
Hahaha
muahahahahaaaa
hee hee hee
ho ho ho
buk-buk-bukaaw
tchok tchok tchok
Meh
Tchoh
fffffffuu
gah
Some of these are kind of like “meow” to me - it represents a cat sound, but do cats really quite sound like that? Onomatopoeia isn’t purely a phonetic equivalent. “Meh” and “gah” for instance are really new words, no? “Pfft” or “buk-buk-bukaaw” on the other hand are phonetic transcriptions of sounds people or animals make, that aren’t really quite words.
I’ve heard that a good belch is often a compliment to some middle-eastern hosts. My cat is Siamese, but he speaks the common language of cats. Beyond that, his growl means exactly what he intends it to mean–dislike. So, some sounds seem to have universal, among the kind, meanings while others are interpreted according to social conditionings.
I would think that onomatopoetic words become a part of our language when we add vowels to them–szzzl, grrgl, mrrmrr.
Sometimes adding vowels doesn’t really help with the thought and you’re left with mrp, shlp (or schlp,) fff, grrf, and so on. I’d say that phonetic transcription depends a lot on what you hear and how you interpret what you hear. My cats ‘meow,’ but they just as often ‘mrp.’ Mrp is contented, meow is demanding. Our dogs often fff, it’s only when they’re having fun that they grrf.
If I knew the sound, I could probably do it for you (probably - its been a while since I had to use IPA). Of course, if you could tell me the sound, then I wouldn’t need to do it for you. Catch 22?.
In general, this is false. Learners of other languages frequently pick up sounds that they didn’t have when they were young (but as OH says, it takes work), at least in recognition. For example, Vietnamese has several consonants quite unlike anything in English: for example, there’s something that resembles an /ʊ/ (as in the u in ‘put’), but said with your mouth kept wide open. However, many people who have come to Vietnam as adults can distinguish this vowel from others.
Although there is a possibility that it is true for certain, paticuarly rare or inticate sounds, it seems unlikely to me - seeing as I’ve never heard of any such languages. Indeed, for almost every language in the world, there is at least one example of an adult non-native speaker becoming completely fluent in the language - which seems to contradict what you’ve heard.
Brevel, thanks for that in-depth information. What kind of effort did it take you to learn this sytem? Did you learn it on your own?
The thing about not being able to hear certain sounds was told to me by a Chinese friend of mine, that I’ve lost contact with. She would make a sound and her friends, including me, would try to replicate the sound. She insisted that not only were we not making the same sound, but that we couldn’t - and she then explained the childhood development aspect of it.
It was just a quick fun thing, none of us were learning Mandarin (or was it Cantonese?) or anything, and I just assumed that what she said was true, or at least in the ballpark. She seemed to know what she was talking about.
Learning IPA was part of my MA. Yes, it’s quite a trial, and I would say that I was far from competent with the system (pretty much no one is fully competent with it, because unless the said person is master of multiple languages, its going to contain sounds which they can’t eaily make). However, it’s not that hard to get to grips with the English phonemic alphabet, so if you’re thinking of it, I suggest starting there (the ‘locus classicus’ is Adrian Underhill’s ‘Sound Foundations’, although a good half of this book is advice for teaching pronunciation to EFL learners, it did kindof invent the current version of the EPA [english phonemic alphabet]).
She’s quite right in some respects. Many English speakers can not distinguish between several sounds in Mandarin (and Cantonese) when they first hear them. The consonants are paticuarly tricky. What she was wrong about, though, is whether they are learnable. They are. I lived with an American guy who was pretty much fluent in Chinese after being there for five years - people would often mistake him for being Chinese when he was on the phone. He had an almost completely native speaker like accent.
Do you think maybe he had contact with those sounds when he was a child? Perhaps he was from a large multi-cultural city or something… I don’t know, but I’m just considering all the possibilities.
No. His first contact with the language was in high school, aged 15.
Plus, his experience is not at all unique. To be honest, I can distinguish (at least in recognition) between all of the sounds in Chinese myself, or at least I could when I was living there and studying (although, obviously, I don’t have anything resembling a native speaker like accent myself!) - apart from when they’re in the Northern accent.
You were having our first contact with the language. If you spent some time in China studying, it’d only be a few months or so before you could pick out all the different phonemes pretty confidently. It takes a lot longer to learn to produce them confidently, though!
That’s amazing to me. I wonder how it happens, that someone who can’t distinguish a particular sound, at some point in the future can distinguish it. I wonder what changes, and how that change happens. Immersion, obviously, but what exactly happens?
Having reflected on this, I don’t actually think that noticing the intial difference is ever that challenging when you are being exposed to minimal pairs, as there is an actual clearly audible difference between all of the consonants and vowels in any language (at least in the languages I’ve learnt).
The closest consonants I can think of in Chinese are ‘z’ and ‘zh’ . They are both here:
Whilst they are similar, they aren’t that hard to distinguish. Perhaps what would be harder would be distinguishing the ‘zh’ from the English dz (the g in george or they j in jump). The chinese ‘zha’ probably sounds a lot like ‘jar’ to an untrained English speaker. However, thats because they are very similar, the main difference is probably (and I’m just trying to work this out by saying them to myself) that the ‘zh’ consonant is a little more sustained: you keep causing friction for the air through your teeth for a little bit - it’s actually probably halfway between the ‘j’ in jump and the ‘g’ in ‘genre’.
After this explanation, you’ll probably (hopefully) find it easir to hear the difference.
I’ve spent hours talking to Russians about the difference between ш and щ and not got it. According to Wikipedia, it’s the difference between ʂ and ɕɕ in IPA, but that doesn’t seem to match what I hear, which is practically no difference. I’m not even sure if it’s consistent; it may even vary by dialect. But sometimes challenging.
