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Gutturals and Consonants and Aspirates, oh My

Posted on Thursday, March 1, 2018

We’ve started language classes! 12 classroom hours a week for the next month. Our teacher is a soft-spoken young woman who has been very patient with us as we struggle through the alphabet and are continuously asking her to repeat letters or write them in English phonetics.

People often say that German sounds angry because of all the guttural sounds of the language. I wonder what they would say about this one. There are three separate letters that are all gutturals, and at first, we couldn’t even tell them apart. Now that we are a week in, I think I’ve almost got it.

Then there are the soft and hard letters. Letters which in English we only have one equivalent for but are differentiated in this language because one is spoken soft and long, and the other is aspirated and cut off. And although the language isn’t tonal, if you get your hard and soft letters mixed up, you might just call your grandpa ‘porridge’, or ask someone to close the wind, instead of the door. I foresee some amusing (and terrifying) language faux pas.

On the bright side, it would appear that word order doesn’t (often) matter. So that’s one grammar headache saved. Also, there is only one alphabet, because they do not distinguish between upper and lower-case letters. This has helped me to appreciate what non-Roman-alphabet users go through when they try to learn English. We have quite a few letters that look very differently in lower-case than they do in upper-case. Not something one usually thinks about.

The hardest thing so far has been learning to pronounce up to four consonants in a row. I’m not kidding. Every consonant French ever dropped, this language picked up. There are even several individual letters which in English require two or three consonants to match in sound.

On the whole, I’m loving it. I’ve always been fascinated by languages and loved learning them. I’m excited to be able to read street signs and food labels, not to mention be able to ask directions or how much something costs. 

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