Date:    Sat, 21 Mar 1998 00:44:45 -0600
<br>From:    Mike Salovesh  t20mxs1[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU 
<br>Subject: Re: Emma Thompson's jaw
<br>
<br>Linda McMillan  lindi[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]netnitco.com  asked:
<br>
<br>  This brings to mind another question: I have a friend who was born in
<br>  Russia and came to the U.S. when she was about 9 or 10, I think.  She
<br>  claims that the reason she has such an evident accent is because her jaw
<br>  was already set by that age for speaking Russian.  Any evidence to support
<br>  her claim?
<br>
<br>I don't know what "setting one's jaw" might be.
<br>
<br>What I DO know is that when I began studying linguistics, I had trouble
<br>with a British linguist's description of "normal" English points of
<br>articulation. (Could it have been Jones?)  It just didn't square with
<br>what I saw in my hand mirror as  I articulated what should have been
<br>apical stops -- the ones normally spelled with "t" and "d".  According
<br>to the textbook, these are done by the tongue tip.  I noticed that in my
<br>own speech there was free variation between that articulation and
<br>another, in which the tongue tip touched the LOWER teeth while the
<br>tongue blade -- the part just behind the tongue tip -- touched the
<br>alveolar ridge.  I just put the whole thing down to idiosyncratic
<br>variation.
<br>
<br>Years later, I was working with a Russian speaker trying to get a handle
<br>on Russian phonology.  (I had some spare time, and was trying to learn
<br>Russian; she taught it at the community college where I worked.)  She
<br>was surprised at how easily I picked up reasonable pronunciation of
<br>Russian palatalized stops.
<br>
<br>I then recalled that "extra" stop that I alternate with t/d in English.
<br>Suddenly, it all made sense: my grandparents all spoke Russian from
<br>childhood.  They learned English as a THIRD language, as adults.  My
<br>parents didn't learn Russian at all.  Still, their English included
<br>Russian phonetic elements, which my brother and I incorporated into our
<br>normal English speech.  (The same elements occur in the speech of
<br>several of my first cousins.)
<br>
<br>There's another  notable feature of many Slavic languages whose
<br>influence you can see in native English speakers whose ancestors spoke
<br>Russian or Polish, etc.  Watch (I really did mean "SEE"!) the use of the
<br>lips in bilabials ("M", "B", "P").  The upper lip stays still; it's the
<br>lower lip that moves.  An observant friend (and firstrate descriptive
<br>linguist) was only slightly exaggerating when he said that "In
<br>Pittsburgh, nobody over the age of 45 has a visible upper lip".  That's
<br>exactly what you would expect from the normal Slavic use of the lips in
<br>bilabials.
<br>
<br>Habitual use of specific points of articulation on a micro scale can
<br>interfere with learning native pronunciations in a second language.  If
<br>neither the learner nor the teacher has a good grasp of articulatory
<br>phonetics, those slight off-pronunciations are extremely hard to
<br>recognize at all.  Correcting them without a sophisticated knowledge of
<br>phonetics is probably hopeless.
<br>
<br>I cite my own speech (and that of my brother and our cousins) to support
<br>the proposition that pronunciation microvariants can carry through a
<br>couple of generations of language separation from the speech community
<br>in which they are normal.
<br>
<br>Maybe I don't know what "setting the jaw" might mean in this context,
<br>but setting the points of articulation usually is not a conscious
<br>process . . . and thus is extremely hard to change.
<br>
<br>--  mike salovesh                                salovesh[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]niu.edu 
<br>    anthropology department
<br>    northern illinois university                     PEACE !!!
<br>