[HPforGrownups] Re: Herm-oh-ninny

[Jen Faulkner]

No: HPFGUIDX 26939

On Sun, 30 Sep 2001 macloudt at yahoo.co.uk wrote:

> --- In HPforGrownups at y..., rcraigharman at h... wrote:
<snip of various Bulgarian phonemes that could, perhaps, be used to
approximate English 'Hermione'>

> Oh, dear, I'm being anal retentive again...Just because Bulgarian 
> contains the *individual* sounds of Hermione's name doesn't mean that 
> Krum is capable of pronouncing the sounds *in that particular 
> order*.  The brain may recognize the letters and sounds, but the 
> mouth just doesn't want to know if the individual is not used to 
> pronouncing those sounds in those orders.  

In principle, Mary Ann, you're right, that phonological constraints of
one's native language can impede (adult) second language
acquisition.  But really, I don't think that adequately explains
Viktor's difficulties with Hermione's name.  Between his two
mispronunciations ("Hermy-own" and "Herm-own-ninny"), he actually does
get all of the sounds in there (if we assume that "hermy" segments to
"her-my", and that the "my" is actually [maj] vel sim., like the English
adjective 'my', and not [mi]), because he then does pronounce /her/
/maj/ /own/ /ni/, which is close enough to be understood, although it
duplicates the initial /n/ of the last syllable at the end of the penult
("own").

I see no reason that an epenthetic consonant (i.e. /n/) should be
inserted at the end of the penult; the next syllable begins with a
consonant, so it's not avoiding hiatus between successive vowels, and
even if began with a vowel, the glide /w/ ought to be sufficient (it is
in English, anyway) to eliminate a perceived hiatus.  Anyway, there
is hiatus prevented by the /j/ glide between the antepenult and
penult.  The last syllable is either [ni] or [nij], so I think [o] or
[ow] should be possible for the penult, unless there is a phonological
rule preventing V(G) or GV(G) from forming a syllable, while allowing
CV(G).  I think that's unlikely to be the case in Bulgarian (though I
freely admit to my lack of knowledge about it, other than that it's a
Slavic language, which I don't much about as a family, other than
they're a branch of Indo-European, and I've seen a fair number of Old
Church Slavonic forms in my historical Greek and Latin linguistics
classes).

Basically, I'm saying that I agree with Craig, here.  It *is* possible
for a native speaker of Bulgarian to pronounce "Hermione" with some
accuracy, at least to the level of /her-ma(j)-o(w)-ni/, because the
mispronuncations don't seem to be phonologically based, but a more
general inaccuracy.  (I don't think there's enough evidence really to
get too specific about the phonetics, though I highly suspect Viktor
would still be pronouncing the /r/ as a trill, and not the English
retroflex /r/, for instance.)  'Wendy' might be a different story... but
his mistakes *are* fixable, and in some degree due to a lack of ability
at language learning, aural/oral processing and sound production(not
correlate with intelligence in general, mind).

> How many of us would be able to pronounce *Bulgarian* like a native?  
> Again, it's something that stumps adults but not kids.

I don't think anyone's talking about native-level accuracy in
pronunciation.  (And it's still possible for adults to learn that, in
many cases, though sometimes only with great difficulty.)  There's a
huge difference between understandable variations in phonetics
(retroflex r vs. using a trill, or the less-understandable but still not
too horrible inserting epenthetic sounds into a
phonologically-impossible cluster (from the point of view of one's
native language), as English speakers are tempted to do with clusters
such as /bn/ that do occur in other lanugages, or the true mistake of
being unable to distinguish phonemes such as /b/ and /bh/, which
contrast in some Indic languages but are allophones of a single phoneme
/b/ in English, etc., etc.) and inserting an entire syllable such as
Viktor's "nin", for no discernible phonological reason.  (It could be
morphologically conditioned, but I doubt that.)  And for what it's
worth, all the sounds of Bulgarian appear to have English equivalents,
more or less, whereas the sounds of English do not all appear in
Bulgarian, meaning that an English speaker should, theoretically, have
an advantage at learning Bulgarian as a second language.  But I don't
know the phonological rules, or how the sounds tend to cluster, so I
don't want to push that too far.

--jen, who wouldn't defend any of that to the death, especially against
someone who *knew* Bulgarian :)

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