Re: What's that?


Mike Barnes wrote:
Jukka Aho wrote:

I've seen it suggested that two speakers of broken, heavily-accented
English - even if coming from different countries, cultures, and
linguistic backgrounds - often understand each other better than the
native speakers would.

Possibly because they're both used to syllable-timed speech, which is
hard going for native speakers.

The difficulty foreigners have with prosody is hardly general. What is
much more exceptional with English (with respect to the speech of a
great many places) is the phonemic distribution of its vowels. It makes
many distinctions within sounds which belong to the same phoneme in
most other languages. Also, especially when talking about the different
L1 Englishes, what are generally perceived as wildly different vowels
are within the same phoneme.

.

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