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Attitude toward caucasian men with non-caucasian women

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funeralxempire
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16 Feb 2022, 9:47 pm

Aspie1 wrote:
funeralxempire wrote:
Hangul is a very straightforward writing system, 24 letters with 10 of them being vowels.
You might be right; I don't know Korean. But I did read that it's a tonal language. Which I think means the same written character can be pronounced in multiple tones, where each tone means a different thing.

It's like a therapist saying "aww" when you talk about being emotionally abused by your parents. It could mean many different things: they're mocking you, they saying emotional abuse is cute, they're asking you for more information, etc. But regardless of what their tone means, it's on YOU to figure it out. And they'll never tell you if you ask what it means, because you're expected to JUST KNOW. But while in therapy you can always err on the side of guardedness, in real-life spoken tonal languages, there's no "default" tone.

Chinese textbooks for foreigners use arrows written above the characters to show tones: there's "rising", "falling", "flat", and maybe more. But Chinese texts for natives have no such arrows. I'm not sure how Korean textbooks handle tones.


Standard Korean isn't tonal although apparently it was and some dialects still are.

Tone in this case isn't like 'tone of speech', it has to do with how pitch is used. The same combination of constants and vowels where the vowel has the pitch modified has a different meaning.

Some examples might be:

Vietnamese:
Bấy nay bây bày bảy bẫy bậy.
IPA: [ɓʌ̌i̯ nai̯ ɓʌi̯ ɓʌ̂i̯ ɓa᷉i̯ ɓʌ̌ˀi̯ ɓʌ̂ˀi̯]
Translation: 'All along you've set up the seven traps incorrectly!'

Thai:
IPA: /mǎi mài mâi mái/
Translation: 'Does new silk burn?'

The words sound very similar but the vowel gets bent differently which makes the words mean completely different things, it's like if English homophones started bending their vowels to avoid ambiguity. A speaker of the language would recognize the sounds each as unique words and I don't believe it would have room for the sort of ambiguity you're worried about.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)


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Aspie1
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16 Feb 2022, 10:08 pm

funeralxempire wrote:
Tone in this case isn't like 'tone of speech', it has to do with how pitch is used. The same combination of constants and vowels where the vowel has the pitch modified has a different meaning.
I'm aware that "tone" means "pitch". But it still strikes me as the old "it's now what you say, it's how you say it".

When each character has just one pitch vs. two or more, it feels like extra memorization, like learning 2+ pitches for each written character vs. just one. Well, at least when learning the language but before it becomes second nature. I know Chinese has five tones, with the "flat" and the "neutral" being very similar.

Then again, it's probably no different the letter A in English being pronounced in multiple ways, depending on where it stands in the word and what letters surround it. Consider: "hat", "hate", "car", and "care".

And don't get me started on "ghoti" being pounced "fish": GH as in "enough", O as in "women", and TI and in "nation".



funeralxempire
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16 Feb 2022, 10:22 pm

Aspie1 wrote:
Then again, it's probably no different the letter A in English being pronounced in multiple ways, depending on where it stands in the word and what letters surround it. Consider: "hat", "hate", "car", and "care".

And don't get me started on "ghoti" being pounced "fish": GH as in "enough", O as in "women", and TI and in "nation".


That's probably a fair comparison even if the details are different.

English is terrible for consistency with spelling, especially the vowels. Largely because things were dramatically shifting during the same period the spellings started to standardize.


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The_Face_of_Boo
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17 Feb 2022, 1:40 am

Aspie1 wrote:
The_Face_of_Boo wrote:
Or maybe not
https://resources.unbabel.com/blog/japa ... s-to-learn

Arabic harder than Japanese? No f- way; our letters may look nice but aren’t masterpiece arts as Japanese.
Arabic isn't much harder than Hebrew, which I know a little bit of. Once you memorize the syllables each consonant can stand for, you can read its text. Although I like the aesthetic beauty of Hebrew characters better, especially the traditional fonts.

You want a really hard language? Try Chinese!
(And Korean. And Thai.) Not only do you gotta memorize tens of thousands of characters, it's also TONAL. That is, the TONE you pronounce each character in changes its meaning. And it's no secret that one of aspies' biggest difficulties is moderating their tone of voice.

Japanese isn't tonal, but it has elements analogous to accented syllables in European languages. Which is easier for aspies to control.


Problem is; Arabic is not one language. :lol:
Try to speak classical or standard modern Arabic (the literary language) in the street; and you would sound like Shakespeare performing a play.



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17 Feb 2022, 2:59 am

i was told by a language teacher that american english was dead-on easiest to learn initially but the hardest to master. IOW it has very low cognitive barriers to foreigners upon entry, but once in it a ways it becomes sort of a quagmire.



cyberdad
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17 Feb 2022, 3:13 am

auntblabby wrote:
i was told by a language teacher that american english was dead-on easiest to learn initially but the hardest to master. IOW it has very low cognitive barriers to foreigners upon entry, but once in it a ways it becomes sort of a quagmire.


Foreigners generally want to learn American followed by British English (in that order) from a native speaker.



auntblabby
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17 Feb 2022, 4:14 am

cyberdad wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
i was told by a language teacher that american english was dead-on easiest to learn initially but the hardest to master. IOW it has very low cognitive barriers to foreigners upon entry, but once in it a ways it becomes sort of a quagmire.


Foreigners generally want to learn American followed by British English (in that order) from a native speaker.

there was, in my gov't job, a lot of foreign nationals who spoke better english than most amuuuricans. there are more people that speak english than there are americans that speak any other language.