Native speakers giving misleading information

[Travis B.]

That said, when I hear actual people IRL speaking real live General American - e.g. middle class black people here in the Milwaukee area - it always sounds so foreign because I hear actual GA from people who are not on TV or the radio so infrequently and it lacks certain things that I am used to hearing from everyone, such as the NCVS (even if it is not the NCVS I am used to, as, say, people from Chicago tend to have a somewhat different NCVS than most people here).

[WeepingElf]

It took me quite a while to realize that in my native language, German, the glottal stop is a phoneme. I know there are people who analyze this differently, but the glottal stop behaves exactly like /h/, whose phonemicity is beyond doubt. They both occur only in syllable onsets, and then as the only consonant in that onset. You can change one into the other or vice versa, and always get something that could be a German word regarding phonology.

Also, at least my idiolect of German appears to be a pitch-accent rather than a stress-accent language as I used to assume.

And recently I met a native speaker of Tamil who claimed that Tamil was Indo-European. I guess this is due to the massive amount of Sanskrit loanwords in that language, similar to the claims that English was a Romance language because there are so many Norman French loanwords in it.

[finlay]

I've had Germans tell me that hast and hasst are pronounced differently ... and ist and isst ... always telling me that the doubled consonants are pronounced "a bit longer".

I think Rory once told me he was doing a phonetic analysis of this kind of thing in English and finding that "thyme" was often pronounced marginally longer than "time". On average. It's like the less common word gets a bit extra stress or something. It's very possible that they will pronounce the double consonant longer to distinguish them if someone asks them to clarify. It's like when I un-reduce schwas to explain the difference between principal and principle, or something like that.

anyway I haven't read this topic before, and the thing mentioned in the first post, that japanese people think that は = is, drives me fucking nuts in lessons. They keep saying things like "Monday is I went to the store" and I have to patiently explain that we cannot say that in English, we'd use a comma ("On Monday, I ...") and more often wouldn't even front "Monday" ("I went ... on Monday"). or when they first learn the word "like", they often try to calque the japanese structure and end up with "She is I like" instead of "I like her".

At higher levels they learn structures like "As for...", which roughly corresponds in meaning to は, but of course they overuse it.

[David Rabinowitz]

I've had a professor tell me that in German the <h> in words such as gehen and sehen was pronounced as a "very weak /h/". She was a native, which was weird. Then, another professor, who was himself not a native but had lived in Germany, told us that was a load of tosh, but that they do pronounce it as an actual /h/ when they're speaking in such a way as to emphatically separate syllables, esp. when they're angry.

I'm pretty certain the first thing is indeed codswallop, but I dunno about the second one, it seems like the sort of thing a native speaker might just do..?

[hwhatting]

The first is indeed nonsense. The second is true for spelling pronounciations, e.g. when dictating, and indeed when speaking slowly for emphasis.

[linguoboy]

The first is indeed nonsense. The second is true for spelling pronounciations, e.g. when dictating, and indeed when speaking slowly for emphasis.

Yeah, I remember hearing the h in gehen pronounce in overarticulated speech. I also had an acting coach who insisted on [ç] in sechs.

[hwhatting]

I also had an acting coach who insisted on [ç] in sechs.

Wow, that's crazy. I can't remember anyone ever pronouncing it like that, even on stage.

[Qxentio]

I've had Germans tell me that hast and hasst are pronounced differently ... and ist and isst ... always telling me that the doubled consonants are pronounced "a bit longer".

But they are pronounced differently. It's /has/ vs. /hast/and /ʔɪs/ vs. /ʔɪst/

Related: Strange, ad-hoc terminology people use when talking about the sounds of their language. I've heard English speakers use "hard" vs. "soft" to mean "voiced" vs. "voiceless" in either direction (i.e. both "hard" = "voiced" and "hard" = "voiceless"), especially when talking about voiceless/voiced pairs that are spelled the same, such as <th> for /θ/ or /ð/ or <s> for /s/ or /z/. I also occasionally hear "hard" and "soft" applied to English vowels, e.g. an SMBC comic from a few years back incidentally contrasting monophthongized [a] with "hard" [aɪ].

I'm used to this distinction as well. It took me a while to realize that other people mean different things with hard and soft, such as palatalization or lack thereof in Slavic languages or hard and soft C and G in English. I only started using voiced and voiceless after starting to study linguistics.

It took me quite a while to realize that in my native language, German, the glottal stop is a phoneme. I know there are people who analyze this differently, but the glottal stop behaves exactly like /h/, whose phonemicity is beyond doubt. They both occur only in syllable onsets, and then as the only consonant in that onset. You can change one into the other or vice versa, and always get something that could be a German word regarding phonology.

To me, the glottal stop is more like phonemic glottalization - sometimes performed as a stop, sometimes a trill (creak) and sometimes not at all. I found that just producing a plain vowel often sounds more like /h/ than /ʔ/, for example in Ast vs. Hast.

Also, at least my idiolect of German appears to be a pitch-accent rather than a stress-accent language as I used to assume.

That's interesting. I come from an area not too far away from you and I've never heared anyone use a pure pitch accent.

I've had a professor tell me that in German the <h> in words such as gehen and sehen was pronounced as a "very weak /h/". She was a native, which was weird. Then, another professor, who was himself not a native but had lived in Germany, told us that was a load of tosh, but that they do pronounce it as an actual /h/ when they're speaking in such a way as to emphatically separate syllables, esp. when they're angry.

I'm pretty certain the first thing is indeed codswallop, but I dunno about the second one, it seems like the sort of thing a native speaker might just do..?

Standard German originated as a written language. The spoken version comes from speakers of Eastphalian Low German from around Hannover trying to pronounce exactly what was written (only as far as I know; this essentially forbidden knowledge and it is downright impossible to find more information on the topic). There is a tradition of hypercorrect spelling pronunciation, especially in schools today, which is meant to make kids think they are really just writing what they speak, they're just not speaking clearly enough. The hiatus-h is a prime example of this. Of course, it is nigh impossible to teach kids about the dozen different principles that come to use in German orthography, so teachers just rely on the easy but wrong phonographic explanation.
And yes, I have heared people sound out letters that are normally silent all the time when they're angry or explaining something as if the other is thick as a brick.

[linguoboy]

I also had an acting coach who insisted on [ç] in sechs.

Wow, that's crazy. I can't remember anyone ever pronouncing it like that, even on stage.

I can't remember if I found it when I looked in Siebs or not. I suspect not.

[Salmoneus]

The first is indeed nonsense. The second is true for spelling pronounciations, e.g. when dictating, and indeed when speaking slowly for emphasis.

Yeah, I remember hearing the h in gehen pronounce in overarticulated speech. I also had an acting coach who insisted on [ç] in sechs.

Incidentally, does anybody know when the /h/ was dropped in sehen? It's been there orthographically all along, and in Low German too, but I don't know when it stopped being pronounced.

[linguoboy]

Incidentally, does anybody know when the /h/ was dropped in sehen? It's been there orthographically all along, and in Low German too, but I don't know when it stopped being pronounced.

In the Early Modern German period (c. 1500) I believe. All the descriptions of MHG orthography I've read explain that h is never mute or used purely to indicate vowel length, but that it has the value of /h/ initially and /x/ in word-final position. I've always taken this to mean that it was /h/ medially.

[Qxentio]

The first is indeed nonsense. The second is true for spelling pronounciations, e.g. when dictating, and indeed when speaking slowly for emphasis.

Yeah, I remember hearing the h in gehen pronounce in overarticulated speech. I also had an acting coach who insisted on [ç] in sechs.

Incidentally, does anybody know when the /h/ was dropped in sehen? It's been there orthographically all along, and in Low German too, but I don't know when it stopped being pronounced.

Well Middle High German had contracted verbs such as the following, which indicates that the medial h-sound had disappeared or was disappearing at that point.

"lân" (from "lâzen", Modern German 'lassen', English 'to let')
"vân" (from "vâhen", Modern German 'anfangen', English 'to begin')
"hân" (from "hâhen", Modern German 'hängen', English 'to hang')
"hân" (from "hâben", Modern German 'haben', English 'to have') This verb generally exhibits the contracted forms in the indicative and the uncontracted forms in the subjunctive.

The official orthographic explanation for the <h> in that word is that it indicates a hiatus. Hence why it also occurs in "gehen", which never had a h-like sound.