Jan. 18th, 2013 11:12 pm
Four fo four?
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
muckefuckFinally finished a more involved post than I had been planning about the development of continuative aspect in Salishan on a site for language enthusiasts. (I may see what feedback I get on it before I attempt to port it over here--it is tough to write about non-European linguistic concepts for a general audience!) It was fun to do--I got to do some research on a language family I've always admired from a distance--but it wore me out.
Overall, the day could only get better after this morning's webinar. At about 80 minutes, it was almost half the length of last weeks, but twice as deadly. They took the most irritating of the three presenters we had before and paired her with a new guy who sounded like he was deliberately trying to speak with as little affect as possible. Honestly, listening to him just sucked the soul out of me; my boss asked what we should do with the ten minutes left on our room reservation and I asked, "Could we work on giving me back the will to live?" (One of my colleagues responded, "You're on your own!")
I actually made it through the previous session pretty easily simply by concentrating on the presenters' accents. The most effective of the bunch had an educated Mid-Atlantic accent--think a New Yorker trying not to sound too New Yawk--and he plowed through the material with urban efficiency. Then there was a guy with a mild Southern Midland dialect and the laid-back attitude to match. And at the bottom was a woman with a pronounced Chinese accent. But it wasn't so much her pronunciation that was the problem but her slow and laboured manner of speaking. Simply deadly. It literally made me squirm in my seat if I had to listen to it for more than a few minutes.
She did have some notable peculiarities, perhaps the most unusual of which was that she systematically distinguished for from four by pronouncing the first non-rhotically. Like most Mandarin-speakers, she could do a perfectly good r (one of my colleagues opined, "She has better r's than me") so at first I thought she was dropping it only in particular contexts. (Words like world and hardly and--let's face it--even word are ballbusters no matter how great an r you have.) But, no, she was perfectly consistent: for was always [ˈfoʊ̯] and four was always [ˈfoʊ̯ɻ], regardless of what followed. I can't think of any reason why somebody would do this.
At times, her syntax went straight to hell and you had to strain to unpack some of her sentences. I don't know if my knowledge of Chinese made this any easier for me, since I could tell at times that she was suffering syntactical interference. Particularly noticeable was her difficulty with verbs like note and point out, which she treated like straightforward ditransitives (just like their counterparts in Chinese). That is, she said, "I want to note you this example" and "I want to point you chapter 7" instead of "I want you to note this example" and "I want to point out chapter 7 to you" (or perhaps "point you to chapter 7").
When it came time to invent a drinking game to keep us awake, I steered away from naming any of her frequent errors. Not only did it seem too meanspirited, but the last think I wanted to do was make the two native Chinese-speakers in the room self-conscious. Instead I singled out her habit of asking fake questions of the other presenters, along with Mr Mid-Atlantic's use of "'kay?" as a discourse particle and the frequent awkward pauses as one or the other fumbled with their notes or missed their cue.
Overall, the day could only get better after this morning's webinar. At about 80 minutes, it was almost half the length of last weeks, but twice as deadly. They took the most irritating of the three presenters we had before and paired her with a new guy who sounded like he was deliberately trying to speak with as little affect as possible. Honestly, listening to him just sucked the soul out of me; my boss asked what we should do with the ten minutes left on our room reservation and I asked, "Could we work on giving me back the will to live?" (One of my colleagues responded, "You're on your own!")
I actually made it through the previous session pretty easily simply by concentrating on the presenters' accents. The most effective of the bunch had an educated Mid-Atlantic accent--think a New Yorker trying not to sound too New Yawk--and he plowed through the material with urban efficiency. Then there was a guy with a mild Southern Midland dialect and the laid-back attitude to match. And at the bottom was a woman with a pronounced Chinese accent. But it wasn't so much her pronunciation that was the problem but her slow and laboured manner of speaking. Simply deadly. It literally made me squirm in my seat if I had to listen to it for more than a few minutes.
She did have some notable peculiarities, perhaps the most unusual of which was that she systematically distinguished for from four by pronouncing the first non-rhotically. Like most Mandarin-speakers, she could do a perfectly good r (one of my colleagues opined, "She has better r's than me") so at first I thought she was dropping it only in particular contexts. (Words like world and hardly and--let's face it--even word are ballbusters no matter how great an r you have.) But, no, she was perfectly consistent: for was always [ˈfoʊ̯] and four was always [ˈfoʊ̯ɻ], regardless of what followed. I can't think of any reason why somebody would do this.
At times, her syntax went straight to hell and you had to strain to unpack some of her sentences. I don't know if my knowledge of Chinese made this any easier for me, since I could tell at times that she was suffering syntactical interference. Particularly noticeable was her difficulty with verbs like note and point out, which she treated like straightforward ditransitives (just like their counterparts in Chinese). That is, she said, "I want to note you this example" and "I want to point you chapter 7" instead of "I want you to note this example" and "I want to point out chapter 7 to you" (or perhaps "point you to chapter 7").
When it came time to invent a drinking game to keep us awake, I steered away from naming any of her frequent errors. Not only did it seem too meanspirited, but the last think I wanted to do was make the two native Chinese-speakers in the room self-conscious. Instead I singled out her habit of asking fake questions of the other presenters, along with Mr Mid-Atlantic's use of "'kay?" as a discourse particle and the frequent awkward pauses as one or the other fumbled with their notes or missed their cue.