61–70 of 115 posts
Because the Bantu languages (most prominently: Swahili) and Japanese have similar sound systems. Finnish is also oddly similar-sounding, or Hawaiian. None of them are actually related. It's because the syllable is restricted in the number of possible forms, in a similar way. (And they all have approximately five vowels. And a pitch accent.) In Hawaiian, nothing but consonant + vowel syllables are possible. Swahili an…
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As a speaker of Scandinavian languages, literally none of the vowels in English map correctly to how we pronounce the same vowels. Several of the English vowels are diphthongs, which we spell out with double vowels. Like eng. "i" is our "ai", eng. "a" is our "ei" - "a bridge" is translated to "ei bro", where the articles are pronounced exactly the same. Or the Scottish word for home, "hame", is pronounced exactly lik…
English vowels are weird compared to most continental European languages, to be fair.
When viewing my resume, my name, Ayo Ijidakinro (Nigerian), is often mistaken for Japanese. Especially because I had on my resume that I speak some Japanese. When I show up for the interview there is surprise. The syllables are identical. A-yo I-ji-da-kin-ro ア-ヨ イ-ジ-ダ-キ-ン-ロ Have always found it interesting.
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As a speaker of Scandinavian languages, literally none of the vowels in English map correctly to how we pronounce the same vowels. Several of the English vowels are diphthongs, which we spell out with double vowels. Like eng. "i" is our "ai", eng. "a" is our "ei" - "a bridge" is translated to "ei bro", where the articles are pronounced exactly the same. Or the Scottish word for home, "hame", is pronounced exactly lik…
English vowels are weird compared to most continental European languages, to be fair.
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That's a good point. Latin letters map to a big number of IPA sounds. I think this is specially true with consonants. Vowels, however, might be the same. For example, Spanish has five vowels (a, e, i, o, u in IPA). Japanese also has five IPA vowels and only the "u" is different in IPA
As a speaker of Scandinavian languages, literally none of the vowels in English map correctly to how we pronounce the same vowels. Several of the English vowels are diphthongs, which we spell out with double vowels. Like eng. "i" is our "ai", eng. "a" is our "ei" - "a bridge" is translated to "ei bro", where the articles are pronounced exactly the same. Or the Scottish word for home, "hame", is pronounced exactly lik…
Ok, but that's still a very high percentage. Shouldn't that be surprising?
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That's interesting. From an English perspective katakana (a system for writing words foreign to Japan, which can't write English very well) seems broken, but I guess from what you say that it's probably effective for most languages
It may be "broken" in the sense that it's not accurate to the original language in orthography or pronunciation, but it's great because it's internally consistent for speakers of Japanese. I can look at any foreign word in katakana and instantly know how to pronounce it in a way that is intelligible to other people in the language I'm speaking: Japanese. Even with the way English does it for other languages that use…
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I don't know IPA, but Japanese e and Spanish e are also different. Spanish e is like English A in "ace", Japanese e is closer to English "eh".
That's the difference between [e] and [ɛ] in IPA (in IPA, with "narrow" phonetic transcription, you enclose the sounds in brackets). In American English, "ace" is [eɪs] and "mess" is [mɛs]. But I don't think that's right; I'm pretty sure both the Japanese e and Spanish e sound exactly the same. And if you pronounced [e] and [ɛ] to native speakers of either Spanish or Japanese, they most likely wouldn't be able to dif…
I learn English since I was pretty young, I believe I'm quite fluent (I mostly use English for work, I lived for two years in an English speaking country, I read books in English, etc), and I still have problems distinguishing some English vowels. I think sound acquisition is one of the hardest things to learn for a non-native speaker.
Then there are real coincidences, like 'Muratori', which is both an Italian name [1] (Casey Muratori) and a real (though somewhat rare) Japanese name. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muratori [2] https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=muratori+%E6%9D%91%E9%B3%A...