There's a word I say several times a day here which I've been working on pronouncing better. It's the Korean formal word for thank you, the IPA transcription for which is /ka̠msʰa̠ɦa̠mnida̠/. It's difficult because there are many phonemes in it which don't exist in English, but which sound similar to phonemes that do.
The first phoneme in the word, /k/, actually sounded to me like the American English /k/ as in 'kite': a voiceless velar plosive consonant. However, I was wrong.
Korean actually has 3 different pronunciations of /k/, each with a different degree of aspiration and force of closure: lax, tense, and aspirated. These are represented as /k/, /k͈/, and /kʰ/ in IPA or ㄱ, ㄲ, andㅋ in hangul.
Because English features a relatively high degree of aspiration, Americans sound like they're always using the most aspirated /kʰ/ no matter which one they're supposed to be using, and at first we actually can't tell the difference between the three at all. So I try to say the lax /k/ or ㄱ, which is a soft, voiceless stop followed by light aspiration. What comes out instead is much closer to the aspirated /kʰ/ or ㅋ.
I've been practicing and it's getting better, but I still can't do it consistently. Also, confusingly, voiced versions of these consonants seem to show up sometimes as allophones depending on placement, so /k/ can become /g/. Normally this only happens intervocalically, but I think sometimes it happens in initial position as well. The revised romanization even transliterates this word as beginning with 'g'. Perhaps it just seems this way because the voice onset time is much longer when the plosive is phrase-initial than when it is word-initial, making it easier to identify as voiceless when phrase-initial than when word-initial.
Next, the vowel /a̠/ which seems pretty close to an American English open back unrounded vowel /aː/ as in 'bra', but it's actually retracted. That was a pretty easy adjustment to make, perhaps because vowels are easy to adjust, or perhaps because the difference was too subtle for my speaking partners to bother correcting, especially given how poor my articulation was on the consonants.
Then comes /m/ which appears to be the first phoneme in the word that exists in English. It's a voiced bilabial nasal just like in the English word 'mom'.
The hardest phoneme in the word for me is the sibilant phoneme for the hangul character ㅅ. It's represented as /s/ but this is misleading because it is articulated very differently from the American English /s/ as in 'sea'. I produce this consonant as a voiceless alveolar fricative, which native speakers seem to identify as being closer to /s͈/, the tensed version written as ㅆ in Hangul.
To make matters worse, the IPA transcription I'm working with doesn't use either /s/ or /s͈/. Instead they're using /sʰ/, seemingly trying to shoehorn this sound into the same categorizations used for the Korean plosive triads by calling it aspirated.
Sibilants are fricatives, not plosives, and I'm not sure how it's possible to aspirate fricatives in the first place. But even if I knew how to do that, Korean speakers have been queuing me to aspirate less rather than more when pronouncing this phoneme.
From imitating them, it seems like it's supposed to be palatalized somehow. Perhaps normally the phoneme is the same but in this case it's substituted for an allophone of some kind, I'm not sure. Apparently, there's some controversy about this phoneme in the field, and I haven't been able to find an explanation.
So that's about as far as I've gotten. It's a little more than one syllable into a five-syllable word. I'm pretty stumped by this sibilant issue. My working theory right now is that because it's word-medial and occurs between two voiced phonemes, some Koreans are voicing it instead of aspirating, making /ka̠msʰa̠ɦa̠mnida̠/ into /ka̠mza̠ɦa̠mnida̠/. We have that same sonorization in English, pronouncing 'whimsical' with a /z/ instead of an /s/.
I wish I knew a Korean linguist.
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