Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 December 4

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

December 4

Would native Spanish speakers understand a foreign Spanish speaker who really can't pronounce the r's?

Would native Spanish speakers understand a foreign Spanish speaker who really can't pronounce the r's, let alone do the tongue trill? Are there phonetic approximations instead? Can native Spanish speakers distinguish non-native Spanish spoken with an American accent and British accent? 71.79.234.132 (talk) 04:26, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

See rhotic consonant. English, French and German each have dialects with a "wrong" kind of /r/, and anyway there must exist Spaniards with a speech impediment, so I imagine there are ways to cope. To the last question: I'd bet I can, and my Spanish is weak. —Tamfang (talk) 08:00, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

I wonder if native Spanish speakers master the r sound last in childhood development. 71.79.234.132 (talk) 12:55, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

Interesting question, .132. I believe the r sound in American English is also one of the last sounds mastered by children. Many cannot distinguish between r and w. --Thomprod (talk) 13:51, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

To answer the second question, a complicating factor is that people in the United States tend to learn Latin American Spanish, while people in the United Kingdom tend to learn Peninsular Spanish. Native Spanish speakers can easily distinguish those two varieties. They might assume that someone speaking Peninsular Spanish with an English accent is British, while someone speaking Latin American Spanish with an English accent is American. That wouldn't mean that they are distinguishing an American English from a British English accent in Spanish, however. Probably the answer to that question is that it would depend on how attuned they are to the differences in English accents. A peasant who has little contact with English speakers might be able to deduce no more than that speakers of the same variety of Spanish from the U.S. and the UK are both some kind of foreigner, while a native Spanish speaker working in a hotel in Cancún might be able to distinguish U.S. Americans speaking Latin American Spanish from Britons speaking Latin American Spanish, since being able to make those distinctions could help him or her to anticipate the guest's needs and have an easier time at work. Marco polo (talk) 14:56, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

That makes sense. Peninsular Spanish has vosotros and conjugated words for that. There may be more linguistic differences, but that strikes me as most salient. 140.254.245.237 (talk) 15:58, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

• If that's the only problem with your accent, no, they will not have a problem with connected sentences of speech. You'll just have an obvious English accent. The trilled r is harder, but there are native speakers who substitute other sounds. The flap is rather easy, and exists in English. The phrase "pot o' tea" pronounced by Americans is very close to spanish para ti ("for you") with the t in pot being identical to the r in para. (The two phrases are not strictly identical, but the differences are not relevant here.)

In disconnected speech you might get some confusion. For example, when my dad worked in PR, my parents knew a child of an American cople named Teddy. When he was introduced to the nanny, she replied, "Oh, Terry", thinking their flapped dees were arrs. Minor misunderstandings like that might happen. The words "but" pero, and "dog" perro are hard for many non natives to produce distinctly, but in the context of a sentence the two words will not be mistaken.

This brief clip of GWB speaking Spanish with a heavy Texan accent and very bad arrs is quite funny, and perfectly understandable to his audience. He makes a witty joke which gets a great reaction. μηδείς (talk) 17:27, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

Let's see if I got it (In white letters so it doesn't spoil it for others if they also wanna try): "President, before you make a speech in Spanish why don't you try to master English first?" Didn't get who supposedly told him that. Medeis, please answer in white font too. Thanks. Contact Basemetal here 17:55, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

Yes, you got the point, although I'd've said ...he told his personnel that he wanted to speak in spanish.../...[and they replied], why don't you try to master English first? The gap makes it unclear who the subject is who is talking to him. In any case, it's funny as all heck, and no Spanish speaker would have a problem understanding him, although his vowels are off and his arr is an English one. μηδείς (talk) 00:10, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

• To directly answer IP 71, Puerto Ricans are notorious for speaking pueltoliqueño. And r and rr do not contrast word initially, so feel free not to trill in words like rojo. You won't have a polished accent, but you won't be misunderstood. Also, word medially, if you can flap your arr, say -jr- instead of -rr-. In other words, say "pe-hro" for "perro" nd you will be taken for having a PR or RD accent. μηδείς (talk) 00:15, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

The Spanish 'r' sounds are easy enough for us northern British English speakers, because we already have them in our dialects. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (Chin Wag) 07:14, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

Do you say lyute or loot for the name of the instrument, K? μηδείς (talk) 22:40, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

I'd say 'loot'. I've never heard anyone say 'lyute', but then again it's hardly ever been a topic of conversation. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (Chin Wag) 01:51, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

Ian McKellan says lyute in the opening soliloquy of Richard III, so I was wondering if you had /ʎ/ "ly-" as a phoneme in your Northern speech. Scots (I believe) have the /x/ and /r/ and /ɾ/, as well as /θ/ and /ð/ of Spanish, and there's really no difference btween /ɲ/ and "ny" as in mañana, User:KageTora. μηδείς (talk) 21:10, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

I've heard it in Northern England, but I associate it more with the North East than with Burnley, Lancashire. Dbfirs 21:20, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

The opening soliloquy of Richard III is also not a very common topic of conversation in the UK. It's mostly foreigners who study Shakespeare, to be honest. I've said this before, but we only get lessons in Shakespeare if we choose them at A-level (age 17-18) and then at university, but most people who do go on to further education (from age 16) generally choose more practical subjects. 'Alas, poor Yoric, I knew him well' is not the opening line to my CV. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (Chin Wag) 21:46, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

What's relevant here is not Shakespeare (whose work was mentioned as an example where the yod is retained by McKellan) but yod-dropping, a common mutation in various English dialects where a y-sound is lost after a consonant. The word lute is mentioned as a specific example. μηδείς (talk) 21:42, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

Kage Tora, it's a good thing the Yorick misquote is not on your CV. There is no "well" in the actual quote. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:12, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

Since the trilled 'r' is preferred in Esperanto, there are some embarrassing anecdotes about Esperantists trying to speak Spanish and inappropriate trilling an 'r'. The lady who was trying to compliment the shopkeepers peras, and instead complimented his perras lindas, had a lot of trouble explaining that she was not referring to the shopkeepers wife and daughters, who were visibly present. --Orange Mike | Talk 02:08, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

Speech disorders only for speakers who fail to pronounce their native language?

Are some speech disorders really designed to help native speakers? Put it another way: would a person be considered having a speech disorder if his native language does not require a specific sound but he can pronounce with enough practice? Or are speech disorders more absolute and imply a physiological abnormality? 140.254.245.237 (talk) 14:28, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

I'm terribly confused between the header and the question. I've tried to pronounce the Czech Ř as I hear native Czechs saying it, to no avail. But not being a Czech myself, I do not consider I have a speech disorder. But I have tried to pronounce words like "through" and "grew" in the way in which many younger Australians do, in which they sound like they're strangling the vowel way down in their spleen area, and I have also failed. But although I am an Australian, I still don't count myself as having a disorder. OTOH, I've never even tried to pronounce the Kalahari bushmen click language, so it's a moot point. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:24, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

I suppose you could have a speech disorder that doesn't manifest itself in your native language. For instance, a lisp might not show up in Australian languages which do not have fricatives, but would show up once you started learning English. But having a foreign accent is not a speech disorder. — kwami (talk) 20:47, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

The question itself does not make sense. Who 'designed' the speech disorder to 'help' native speakers? By definition, a disorder is a hindrance, not a help. Also, a person who can pronounce a sound 'with enough practice' though not necessary in his native language would not use that sound in his native language. I am native to the UK, and I speak Chinese - this doesn't mean my English turns into a tonal language. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (Chin Wag) 07:07, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

I think you need to consider more carefully what constitutes a disorder of speech. If you are talking about speech sound disorders, it is extremely common for people learning a new language after childhood to have a great deal of difficulty producing sounds in the new language that are not present in their native language (such as English-speakers learning Chinese and attempting to reproduce the difference between the ch/zh/j or s/sh/x/z sounds or the r sound, or speakers of various Asian languages attempting the l or r sounds in English). There is no real difference between these and speech sound disorders in native languages; the speaker is equipped with all the same machinery of speech as everyone else and has simply not learned to use it to produce a specific sound. The difference between a speech sound disorder and difficulty learning a new language is mostly about which stage of life the learner is in; small children are expected to pick up language sounds easily and failure to do so is termed a disorder, while adults are expected to have difficulty picking up new sounds.

Of course, there are other sorts of speech disorder. Some, such as stuttering or cluttering, will likely affect someone's speech equally in all languages; others have physical causes and most of these will also affect speech equally in any language, though perhaps not all. According to our article on Speech disorders, only 5-10% of the population are without some sort of speech defect (though the claim goes unreferenced just now).

The question is further complicated by regional accents and dialects; Beijingers pronounce certain parts of Chinese markedly differently from natives of other parts of the country; the deep South of the USA sounds markedly different from New England; and thems a zummerset zes gert many things as thems lunnuners thinks nonation. On ee cust, ee ont loike ee a same, begammers. GoldenRing (talk) 02:54, 9 December 2014 (UTC)