Re: "Hyundai"

Snidely wrote:

HEMI® - Powered wrote:
[...]

like the famous inability
of Orientals to pronounce any word with an "L" in it as if it
were an "R" as in "Jorry" instead of our "Jolly".


It isn't that they can't pronounce "L" and "R", it's that they can't
hear *any* difference...fMRI* work has shown that in Euro-related
languages, the native speaker has 2 different regions of the brain
responding to the sound, but Asians who are not native Euro-lang
speakers have 1 region that responds to both sounds.

A quick search of Sci Am suggests Dec 2004 (the "Head Lines" section,
but I don't have the article to hand. But see also Cerebral Cortex,
Vol. 13, No. 2, 155-161, February 2003© 2003 Oxford University Press
"Brain Imaging of Language Plasticity in Adopted Adults: Can a Second
Language Replace the First? "
C. Pallier1,2, S. Dehaene1, J.-B. Poline1, D. LeBihan1, A.-M. Argenti2,
E. Dupoux2 and J. Mehler2
<http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/13/2/155>

As I recall from a Japanese friend's careful pronunciation of the ra, re, ri set, it sounds like an l for us before o and u, but r in other positions. For them, it sounds like the same sound, but those who have learned other languages can usually explain it. I assume the tongue is in a slightly different position anyway.

--
Rob Bannister
.

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