In my target language of Korean, there are many examples of phonetic inventory. These include nasalized final stops, plosive bilabial, plosive alveolar, plosive palatal, plosive velar, nasal bilabial, nasal alveolar, fricative alveolar, fricative glottal, palatal glides, and liquid alveolar. There are some sounds in Korean that do not exist in American English like the euh-ee (which is a character in Korean). This character is used in a lot of words such as euh-ee sah which means doctor in korean and euh-ee ri (meaning loyalty in korean) just to name a few. I know that the sound system is a little smoother than Chinese and harsher than Japanese for reference and there are not intentional harsh saying of words in the korean language and a lot of words come from English like ice cream. I will acquire the ability to discriminate differentiated segments in my listening and provide them in my speech by practicing my speaking with other korean speakers, listening to music with korean words, and listening to more korean radio.
You need to be a member of The SDLAP Ning to add comments!
Replies
Interesting post, Tommy, but it's important to qualify the underlying meaning of the term, 'phonetic inventory.' Every language has its own phonetic inventory, e.g. the finite number of sounds that are used to convey all words and phrases. You can think of a phonetic inventory as the catalog of language-specific sounds that then form the basis of the language as a whole. The terms 'smoother' and 'harsher' should be explained using the principles of primary manner, secondary manner, and point of articulation. Using the terminology of articulatory phonetics, how would you describe these differences?