Discussion Post #3

[Tianhui Qiu]

The article mentions four-level models of languages, which includes phonetics, phonology, grammar and semantics. To be honest, I’m still confused about the difference between phonetics and phonology, since they are both the study of the sound. But still, I want to compare the structures of languages I studied before. In terms of sounds (not sure it is phonetics or phonology), I feel like English, French and Turkish have similar sound system, though English has the simplest one, while Chinese is totally different from them. It is interesting to see that every language has its “fixed pattern” of sounds, and if you are going to learn a new language which contains the sounds beyond that pattern, you will have trouble pronouncing that sound. For example, when I was studying French, some of American students will find it really hard to pronounce “r” in French, because English does not have that sound. But for Chinese it’s quite easy because we have similar sound in our language. And I found I could not pronounce “r” in Turkish, even after practicing a lot, I still can’t, since I’ve never got any touch with that kind of sound before and it is like I can’t control my throat. In terms of grammar and semantics, it is interesting to see that French has feminine and masculine difference while Chinese, Turkish and English don’t have it, so I found it really hard to sort it out when I was studying French at the beginning. But English sometimes has something similar to this. For example, actor stands for masculine and actress stands for feminine. But most of time there’s no such difference. Also, Turkish put the negative form into the verb itself, so it doesn’t have auxiliary verbs (words like am, is, do, doesn’t in English or suis or n’est pas in French).

[Global Studio]

Interesting post, Bonnie! In the future, remember that we use brackets and then symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet to approximate speech sounds.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/IPA_chart_2018.pdf