Huyền thoại về “liaison” trong tiếng Anh

This will be available in Vietnamese soon. // Bài viết này sẽ sớm có bản tiếng Việt.

“Liaison” seems to be a simple explanation for how words connect in English pronunciation.

However, if we believe that “liaison” is occurring, then that makes all of the other effects more complicated, because they don’t make sense, so the student simply has to memorize them without ever understanding why.

Learning in that way also leads to some systemic mistakes, which the learner cannot detect because they don’t know the reason for the the correct effect and therefore cannot tell when the effect that they’re taught is actually wrong. Moreover, if they were taught using the real explanation, then there would never be any incorrect effects, because the effects are effects rather than rules.

Teaching with “liaison” is actually a quick & dirty hack to force students to pronounce their ending sounds. It sidesteps the entire issue of different phonetic models and of what even a phoneme is, leaving the majority of students with a very broken approximation of English pronunciation. It might be good enough for a streetside restaurant, café or souvenir shop, but it certainly will not suffice in an international business meeting.

“I wan do ee da na bul” 🍎

Learning with “liaison”:

• would /wʊd/
• you /juː/
• would + you = /wʊ.ʧuː/

This effect is partially incorrect, because the unvoiced ʧ should be the voiced ʤ counterpart.
This is complicated by the American devoicing of final voiced consonants, because the method of this occurring is often unknown and therefore unnoticed and not taught.

• In some accents, bad and bat have distinct final phonemes: /d/ and /t/.
• In some accents, they have the same final phoneme: /t/.
• In all accents, their rime vowels /a/ are slightly different in length:
  • In “bat”, the /a/ is shorter, as the vocal cords stop vibrating just before the /t/ is pronounced.
  • In “bad”, the /a/ is longer, as the vocal cords continue vibrating right into the /d/ vocalisation.
• In the accents which devoice final voiced plosives, the contrast in rime vowel length is maintained. This is how people can distinguish which word is being pronounced.

If this is not understood, a learner will believe that “would” is transcribed as /wʊd/ but pronounced as /wʊt/, which naturally has a slightly shorter rime vowel. (This can be marked in IPA but isn’t necessary for now.)

This leads to both the learners and the (non-native) teachers pronouncing “would you” as /wʊʔ.ʧuː/, with a short rime /ʊ/ and often an additional glottal stop, which sounds like “woot chew” or “wuh chew” or something like that.

Remember that: this is not an isolated case! This issue is prevalent throughout the Vietnamese style of pronunciation and of learning. Additionally, depending on context to support the listener’s understanding of your pronunciation is BAD practice and should NEVER be expected. Avoid it at all costs; make the greatest effort that you can to make your pronunciation the most clear and understandable.

Learning with the true understanding of what a phoneme is:

• would /wʊd/
• you /juː/
• d+j = /ʤ/ (This is “assimilation” and it occurs within words and across word boundaries.)
• would + you = /wʊd.ʤuː/

This result can be mathematically determined by any student who has been taught about the basics of phonemes and assimilation.

Actually, these two concepts are extremely simple.

A phoneme is a singular, indivisible unit of sound. It has only one constituent part.

Whilst plosives cannot be pronounced without a release, it is easy to recognize what one is simply by comparing multiple syllables consisting of one plosive and different vowels: ba, bi, bu, be, bo; remove the vowels from each one and it becomes abundantly clear what exactly a /b/ phoneme is.

Once a phoneme is understood to be a position plus a method, the concept of assimilation comes naturally:

Assimilation is the combining of two positions and/or methods, in order of spelling.

Once assimilation is understood, all the other “rules” become much more sensible and logical, including both spelling rules (like digraphs [sh, th] & trigraphs [tio, cio]) and spelling effects (like dr, tr).

• h often acts as a softener:
  • sh = s + aspiration, a softening of the harsh /s/ backwards into /ʃ/
  • th = t + aspiration (continuant), also softening /tʰ/ into /θ/
  • th for /ð/ (this, that, than) is kind of an accident 🙃
  • gh used to represent a few different velar-ish phonemes, but most of these have dissolved into silence. (You can kind of detect them but that’s a post for another day.)
• i is from iota, also equivalent to Hebrew yod, and its effects are called iotization or palatalization. i in iota is /i/, right next to the palate:
  • tiV = /ʃə/ (V = any vowel)
  • ciV = /ʃə/ , /ʧə/
  • siV = /ʃə/ , /ʒə/
  • even ci and ce changing /k/ to /s/ is a long bygone effect of assimilation.
• r often adds palatal assimilation (palatalization, iotization) along with the rhotic lip+tongue curls:
  • dr = /d/ + /ɹ/ = /ʤɹ/ e.g. drive, drink, dry
  • tr = /t/ + /ɹ/ = /ʧɹ/ e.g. trust, true, try. Notice that ⟨chr⟩ never appears as /ʧɹ/, although it does appear as /kʰɹ/ stemming from Greek.
  • sr = /s/ + /ɹ/ = /ʃɹ/ Although this rarely, perhaps never occurs in English (except for portmanteaus), but notice that ⟨shr⟩ is very common, possibly introduced as a reflection of this assimilation effect: shrink, shrew, shroud, shriek, shrill

The ability to pronounce final consonants also increases when the learner understands what a phoneme truly is. Before they know, they expect a phoneme to align with whatever their mother tongue contains and/or teaches. Therefore, in Viet Nam, learners believe that a non-vowel phoneme inherently contains a default vowel (despite it being called “âm vị”), because the method of teaching is too simplistic. Unfortunately, teaching in a simplified method by shortcutting the truth, focussing solely on practicality for efficiency, tends to result in people who cannot do the skill correctly because they just have not been taught it correctly.

If your mother language is a similar phonetic model to the language that you’re learning, then probably you’ll be ok if you don’t focus on IPA and phonemes.
But if your mother tongue and target language have different models of pronunciation, then it really is vital that you spend some time digging into phonetics and the IPA! Not only will it improve your ability to pronounce, speak clearly and be understood; it’ll also help you to listen better and to more easily understand what’s being said. Remember that English features a lot of contracted words, prefixes and suffixes, and these really only appear as tiny phonemes: ‘ll, ‘d, -ed, ‘s, -s, -t, -n’t, ‘ve, -n’t’ve, etc.

It should be noted that there are many, many more effects of a similar ilk as assimilation, but they are all distinct and operate in different ways. By incorrectly teaching a non-existent “rule” or “function” of English, the awareness of these types of effects is also lacking, so students will never become aware of those, either. One such example is epenthesis, in which a small break is added because the speaker’s native language model doesn’t support those two phonemes being pronounced together. Indeed, sometimes it does, but only in certain syllable contexts.

Things only seem “too complicated” if they are not taught clearly, and if the teacher themselves has not been taught it or discovered it for themselves. Avoiding teaching something because it is “too complicated” does not make a teacher good. As a teacher, your job is a service to other humans, and most of them need to use these skills in their professional life. By avoiding complexities, you are not helping your students; you are doing them a great disservice.

If you are a student: when a teacher teaches you something that seems more complicated or complex than usual, don’t just ignore it or wait for them to give you a simpler explanation. Firstly, it is an excellent exercise to use your brain to struggle through understanding something complicated. Secondly, life is not simple, so perhaps the information that they’re delivering to you just cannot be simpler. Sometimes – well, always, if you want to grow strongly – we need to grapple with difficult things in order to learn them. Stop looking for the easy, comfortable path.

If you are a teacher: don’t shy away from teaching complicated concepts to your students! If you have a co-teacher who speaks their language, they can help; and over time, your co-teacher/s will come to recognize the power and benefit of what it is that you’re teaching – they themselves will understand it better and will start to find their own ways of translating the information in their language. But, better yet: you too will refine your method of conveying these concepts. It might feel confusing, messy, off-track, but not every moment has to be “perfect”, that is neither how nor when we learn. Try it out at home, on your friends, on your colleagues (if they’re not too proud), and on your class. Education is not a simple activity. And, just because learning languages is more common than learning physics, doesn’t mean that language classes must be super simple. Languages have complexities! That’s ok!