Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

Caution: Not a post to be read aloud among small children or grandmothers

Readers & commenters have been more diligent than your haplessly hard-working correspondent recently. There’s some great dialog about how L and N, or P, F & H blend together in different languages. On foreign phonologies, Andrew Galbraith hit the nail on the head with:

As for the whole L/N thing, I think life in Hong Kong and Shanghai has made me susceptible to mixing the two. I was recently in Lebanon, where I clearly thought I heard the Arabic word for “No” — “La” — as “Na.”

I love this kind of phoneme dissonance — the realization that your OWN native language conditions you to hear phonetically very similar sounds as completely and utterly different.

For me, the stages of realization go something like this:

1. “C’mon, those two sounds aren’t anything like each other”

2. “Well, all right, maybe they’re kinda similar”

3. “Wow, it’s amazing we hear those two sounds as different at all”

4. “Y’know, what’s the difference anyway?”

To throw Korean into the phoneme mixology, that language has a heavily aspirated P. I taught there years ago and fondly recall one evening after class when a verbose student of mine was pontificating about a recent bad shopping experience. My mind, I admit, was wandering, when all of a sudden I was jolted out of my reverie when he said, very loudly, “the fucking lot.”

Yikes, good teaching moment, right? But I hadn’t quite been listening to his story and needed to clarify.

“What did you say?”

“in the FUCKING lot.”

“What was a fucking lot?”

“I was fucking my car in the fucking lot.”

The light dawns. Oh, yeah… Take away the rhotic R, distort the vowel, aspirate the heck out of that P, and what do you get?

Now you might accuse me of phonetic exaggeration, but I swear that’s how I remember it. If only we’d had a Pusan Sounds at that point and a handy recorder.