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Re:That is why it is so hard for us, adult immigrantuses, to learn to speak without an accent, if it's at all possible... Excuse us.
Dear viktor,
Don't worry about it! In my family, my sister is married to a Japanese national, and her marriage name, Tsuyuki, contains a ts sound, that unless you have learned at an early age is hard to "hear" as being different from a plain S sound--so she often 'mispronounces' her own name.
her maiden name, Reilly-- gives her husband problems, and is just as like like to sound like Leary when he says it!
even those of use who speak english as a native language, sometime have trouble with D/J-- during comes out of my mouth and enters my ear as juring-- but i have asked others to listen for the word as i speak, and they all swear i am saying during--i know i am not!
others here can give many other examples...
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stranger
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stranger
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Helen, his name - Isaac, we pronounce it [Ee-sah-ah-k]is obviously jewish, but his familia looks russian, with typical -ov ending, which is pronounced as -of by the virtue of consonantalization schemes of russian speech. It just seems easier and more natural for us. Such family names were spelled -off in the past to reflect it. E.g. Romanoff (tsar Romanov). However the letter 'z' ('s' was incorrectly spelled) in his family name is pronounced [z],as in Zoo! To verify it, you can look at his homepage, and reed his own opinion on sounding of his family name: http://www.asimovonline.com/asimov_FAQ.html#starters
And yes, it's in English!
Little excerpt from there:
How do you pronounce "Isaac Asimov"?
"EYE'zik AA'zi-mov". "AA'zi-mof" is also OK. The name is spelled with an "s" and not a "z" because Asimov's father didn't understand the English alphabet clearly when the family moved to the U.S. in 1923. (In Russian, the spelling was the Cyrillic equivalent of Azimov, and in Yiddish, the Hebrew letters were aleph-zayin-yod-mem-aleph-vav-vav.) One way to remember this pronunciation is the pun from The Flying Sorcerers by Larry Niven and David Gerrold: "As a color, shade of purple-grey", or "As a mauve". Asimov wrote a poem ("The Prime of Life") in which he rhymes his surname with "stars above"; someone else suggested amending the poem to rhyme it with "mazel tov", which he thought an improvement.
Asimov's own suggestion, however, as to how to remember his name was to say "Has Him Off" and leave out the H's.
P.s. I still think that [z] in Zinger sounds as in Zoo zone! But only Germans among us can clarify... Please!
Viktor V. Trukov
Viktor V. Trukov
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stranger
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Yes, I've always heard "ejucation" from everywhere, but recently one of my american friends said repeatedly - education. I wonder what's wrong with him or me...
Viktor V. Trukov
Viktor V. Trukov
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I will check in my dictionary at home, but I can already say that I am not even able to say "ts", and surely I don't hear this sound in Pizza.
I don't think that I am even able to distinguish between ts and z, they seem the same to me ( unless saying ts slowly, clearly separating t and s)
By the way, zzzzzzzz is the italian onomatopeic sound for mosquitos
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Carpal Tunnel
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Ts is a common beginning of Navajo family names, e.g., Tsosie, but I could never hear it as anything other than S.
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Carpal Tunnel
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emanuela, does the z sound in pizza or piazza or ragazza sound like the ts in my name, Betsy? If so, you are hearing it but just don't realize you are hearing it. Like Viktor said. I think.
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my dictionary suggests the pronounciation
pittsa !!!!!
yes, you are right, it's me, that not hear the sound, or do not recognize it!
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the brain can't make sense of it and relays info to the conscious in the form of phonetics which are familiar to the person... That humble almighty brain...
Very insightful, Viktor.
Psychologists call this phenomenon "banalization", I believe. It probably explains why eye witnesses of the same event see different things. The variations are probably predictable when you factor in things like race, culture, religion, socio-economic status and so on.
In short, we see [or hear] what we expect to see [or hear] and the brain filters out a lot of what is inconsistent with expectation - automatically. The whole truth [or the real truth] never reaches "the conscious" so we are always convinced we are right, just as you say.
These rough-hewn "schemata" served our primitive ancestors very well in fight/flight situations where instanteous judgments meant the difference between life and death, but they are a great impediment to tolerance and understanding between different races and cultures and faiths and socio-economic groupings today.
As you say, "the humble almighty brain".
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Carpal Tunnel
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re:In short, we see [or hear] what we expect to see [or hear] and the brain filters out a lot of what is inconsistent with expectation - automatically
This is not just for flight or flight, it is a real part of learning and functioning, we don't have to learn things over and over again, they can be learned and 'forgotten'..
especially conveniet for skills like shifting in a car.. you 'feet' know how to do, your 'brain' is free to look for pedestrians, or other traffic..
marijuanna, tends to remove this filter, and make every experience seem fresh--people high on marijuana get excited over mundane things. like the twill weave of their jeans, or the complex set of flavors and smells we know as vanila..
but the attraction of so many new like experiences make them a hazzard.
the filter system is complex, and marijuana interferes with parts of it.. especially food and taste.. foods taste 'new'- and complex.. in a hunter gather society, where just collecting enough calories are important, your brain would learn to just focus on 'right?' or 'wrong?' to make sure you were collecting the edible variety of plant and not something poisonous.
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
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The brain is capable of "multitasking" far more complex than any computer is. And the capability can be ennanced by practice. I spent a couple years as a PBX operator in a rather large hospital. I got so I could juggle six or eight
calls, remembering who the callers were, who they were calling, and the phone numbers needed without having to consult any list. I would be a miserable failure at it now.
My recent memory is a travesty of what it used to be.
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