Vietnamese's Ngô Bảo Châu has just been awarded the priceless Field Medal, and I heard VTV News's reporter Diep Anh pronouncing Field as /fi:nd/. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li81L7xwio8)
Received Pronunciation traditionally has a clear /l/, which comes before a vowel, such as in late, love, look, etc. and a dark /ɫ/, which stands elsewhere, such as in milk, world, Bill, little, etc. It is this dark /ɫ/ that causes particular difficulty for many native Vietnamese speakers of English. Instead of producing it, they often replace it with /n/, and we have the /fi:nd/ Medal, like what our reporter has made, or produce an unidentifiable allophone, which appears to be a mixture of /r/ and /l/. This happens obviously because Vietnamese does not have /l/ with this distribution.
English pronunciation has been changing, and one of those changes makes learning it easier for Vietnamese. When /l/ is in this position (the dark dark /l/, /ɫ/), it is now vocalized and becomes much the same as /o/, /u/, or /w/, so that /l/ in milk, world, Bill, little can be pronounced with absolutely no contact between the tongue tip and the alveolar ridge. Consequently, instead of saying /mɪlk/, we can now make it as /mɪok/, mɪuk/, or /mɪwk/. This is absolutely different from /l/ in late, look, clear, etc, where it precedes a vowel, and it is also as different as that from the traditional /ɫ/.
Reference:
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/yorksdial-uni.htm
Wow, you did a good job. I found this blog post when searching games for teaching pronunciation and this really surprises me.:) Keep up the good work, guy:D ( But I recommend that you use Wordpress to setup your own blog. I'm trying to start one:))
ReplyDeleteThank you for reading. I'm wondering how you could find a blog in such a remote corner of the Internet like this. I've thought before that no one else but me would visit it :))
ReplyDeleteBTW, I guess I know you, but I'm not so sure about it :) Clicking on the link behind your name didn't give me the answer.
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