How many words in this sentence can you pronounce correctly?

[TaiwanPofLee]

Response to emsr2d2 (#20):

1. Thanks for your SUGGESTED corrections of my wording and punctuation errors.

2. "Won't it be better if.." is conditional, not subjunctive.
3. Although "the UK" and "the USA" are correct usage, I googled randomly the following:
Difference Between USA and UK
1. The USA practices the federal constitutional republic form of government while the UK uses constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary system.
2. USA has 50 states and one federal district whereas the UK is a single state kingdom comprised of four different countries.
3. The USA is more of a continent (a clumped piece of land) whereas the UK is more of an archipelago.
4. The USA has a bigger land area than UK, as well as, a bigger GDP or gross domestic product.
5. UK was a more powerful nation in the 19th century while the USA is the present most powerful nation in the world.
* * *
3.UK and USA have the same industry sectors(agriculture,industries and services)
Read more: Difference Between USA and UK | Difference Between | USA vs UK http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/difference-between-usa-and-uk/#ixzz3aDaCIHIC

 

[TaiwanPofLee]

Response to emsr2d2 (#20):

You are talking about real life while I am concerned with efficient teaching and learing of English pronunciation.

Change brings about progress.

It benefits a nation and its people when there is a unified national language with standard pronunciation.

 

[MikeNewYork]

I would rather talk about real life. I appreciate your passion for your field, but you are placing way too much emphasis on phonemic symbols. They will not solve the world's problems. There is an old saying "Change is inevitable, progress is optional."

 

[Barb_D]

Wow.
It's clear to me that you actually have no interest in our responses at all, unless they go something like this:
Oh wow! Finally someone is doing something about this problem! And finally you have created the ONE SINGLE ANSWER to this REALLY BIG PROBLEM that no one else seems to recognize.

You won't get that from us. And it doesn't matter how many threads you create trying to sell people your system.

And by the way, the corrections by Ems were spot on, both in tenses and the use of "the."

 

[Barb_D]

It benefit a nation and its people when there is a unified national language with standard pronunciation.

If you are referring to the US, that will never, ever happen. Nor will it in the UK. I don't know much about Australian English, but even in Canada, I suspect the English of Nova Scotia sounds different than the English of Vancouver.

 

[TaiwanPofLee]

To Barb_D (#24):

I have read with interest and appreciation all the responses. I am looking forward to more respondents.

 

[Barb_D]

Let's be honest. You are looking forward to responses that support you and not to ones like ours.

 

[Skrej]

I think the basic problem is that one can't make a fair comparison between Chinese and English (or many other languages).

Chinese has a couple of unique problems not faced by English, both with spoken and written language. The first is that English uses an alphabetical system of writing (although famously not purely alphabetical). With alphabetical writing, you basically get one symbol for each sound or phoneme. In other words, you can have symbols for sounds which don't mean anything until combined with additional sounds. I can make the sound /b/ in English, but it doesn't have any meaning.

Chinese is logographical, meaning you have a new symbol for each word, or each morpheme (meaningful unit of sound). 人 means something in Chinese, 'person'. So a single symbol can convey an entire word or idea. Not so with an alphabet.

Plus, Chinese is tonal, meaning the same symbol pronounced in a different tone can convey a new meaning. English primarily isn't tonal, although we can convey mood somewhat.

A Chinese syllable needs a 'map' to pronounce it - you've got up to 3 parts, right? An onset, a nucleus, and possibly a coda. Plus you can (depending upon variety of Chinese being spoken), have something like 6-10 different tones, giving you that many different ways to pronounce just that one syllable. Use the wrong tone, and now you've changed the meaning.

Compare that to the letter 'p' in English, - there is only a slight difference in aspiration between the 'p' in PIN versus APE. You might aspirate the 'p' incorrectly but it still wouldn't change the meaning.

So, the Chinese government has necessarily taken steps towards standardization pronunciation guidelines. I discussed this with a Taiwanese colleague, and she commented that she was taught pronunciation in schools as soon as she began to read and write, and commented that the two went hand in hand - she couldn't fathom learning Chinese without being taught pronunciation as well.

Secondly, the variants of Chinese are much more divergent than the variants of English, to the point that many variants and dialects of Chinese are no longer mutually intelligible. While there are differences in say BrE and AmE, those differences will at most cause some minor confusion, but not prevent comprehension. Even the most extreme differences (for example Haitian English and American English), the American is still going to understand the Haitian without a great deal of effort, although with a bit more effort than required to follow an Australian.


So I can understand your viewpoint, and would even agree with your comments, IF applied to Chinese. However, as others have said here, pronunciation is never going to be standardized in English, even within one country, because it simply isn't really needed. As long as children learn their basic sound/letter associations, then all is well.

Different texts and dictionaries will even use slightly different systems for notating pronunciation, and the only reason there's even a need for those is because English isn't purely 100% alphabetical. We have 40-44 sounds, and only 26 letters, the difference being mainly in vowels, so dictionary writers invent systems to represent those 'missing' letters. This is also partly why English spelling can be confusing, since it isn't truly alphabetical.

There are some unofficial pronunciation standards, at least in the U.S. - for example, national news broadcasters are actually trained to adopt a certain 'General American' accent, one which specifically lacks any distinctive regional accents. The idea being that you can't tell where the newscaster is from just by listening. However, this has never been and will never be the 'official' accent for the nation, so there isn't a designated system to transcribe that pronunciation.

That's what the alphabet is for, even if it doesn't do it quite do the job perfectly in English. Other languages with alphabets do stick to a closer match between phonemes and letters. The Spanish alphabet for example has 27 letters, and about 24 phonemes (up until 2010 it has 29 letters).

So in theory, an alphabet should be the pronunciation guide you're proposing to adopt. So English already has a pronunciation guide, it's just not 100% accurate.

 

[TaiwanPofLee]

Hi Skrej! Thank you for your lengthy, sensible and knowledgeable response (#28).

Agreeing to all that you have written, I would like to leave open the question why popular English dictionaries such as Oxford, Cambridge, Collins, Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, and Longman carry phonetic symbols.

 

[Skrej]

Dictionaries carry those symbols in an effort to render those 'extra' sounds in English not represented by letters. Plus some letters can represent multiple sounds, so they use their various systems to clarify pronunciation.

 

[MikeNewYork]

Dictionaries provide phonetic symbols for those who need them. That does not imply that everybody needs them. I rarely look at them.