What is the difference between sound and spelling? Why is this distinction significant for your language-learning efforts? Describe the phonetic inventory of your target language. Are there sounds in your language that don’t exist in American English? If so, provide several words and their phonetic transcriptions of words as examples to support your argument. What do you need to know about the sound system of your target language? How will you acquire the ability to discriminate differentiated segments in your listening, and to produce these sounds in your speech?
Spelling is the process of forming words through different combinations of alphabets contained within a language whereas sounds are the vibrations of air particles that allow us to both send and receive information via auditory stimulus. Since my target language is ASL, I will be writing from the perspective of my mother tongue, Nepali. Nepali is a very rich and passionate language. I would say that the aspect of sound is more important than the aspect of spelling since most people learn a new language by repetitive listening as to how the different words and sentences are pronounced. Nepali, like most other South Asian languages, is an Indo-Aryan language of the sub-branch of Eastern Pahari. There are 38 segmental phonemes in Nepali, of which 6 are oral vowels, 31 are consonants, and 1 is suprasegmental. Additionally, there are 5 more nasalized vowels. There are several sounds in Nepali that do not exist in English for example, Nepali uses aspirated bilabial stops ‘ph’ and ‘bh’ instead of fricatives: / f / and / v / respectively. Thus, many borrowed English words are pronounced very differently in Nepali for example, the word “fan” is pronounced as “faen” in English but as “phen” in Nepali. “Van” is pronounced as “vaen” and “vhen” in English and Nepali respectively. One aspect of the Nepali sound system that I have been interested to further explore is the distinction between the 6 oral and 5 nasalized vowels. It is primarily due to the differences in these vowels that make it difficult for English and Nepali speakers to try and pronounce each other’s words properly. As a native speaker who has been talking and writing in Nepali almost my entire life, I already possess the ability to discriminate differentiated segments in my listening and produce those sounds in my speech. Although, sometimes I confuse my pronunciation of certain letters because I am so much more used to saying it in Nepali. For example, we pronounce “J” as more of a “Z” so “Jew” and “Zoo” in English would most likely be pronounced as “Zoo” by a native Nepali speaker who might not know some of these nuances.
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