“It was Sunday and I was at home back in Brazil. The phone rang so my father picked it up. Immediately afterwards, he turned the phone to me, a little bit surprised. ‘Somebody’s speaking English’, he said. It was a professor from Virginia Richmond University who was visiting Curitiba with some students. He called to tell me he had just arrived – I would help his team during the city tour. (the very first time I worked as an interpreter!) It feels awesome to be able to speak two languages and then make connections between them, but I have to admit that I was scared of speaking English on a phone. That was the first time I had to do it. I was scared because, on the phone, there are no visual clues. It’s all about sounds. And sound-related skills were kind of troublesome for me. But, in the end, all went well.”
“Six months later, I’m standing at the office of Mr. Andrew Dimock, Branner’s academic director. We were working on a petition for me to change my assigned PWR quarter. I had a very good idea of how to justify my request, i.e., I knew what I would write. All I would have to do was to submit my petition online and wait for a response. But the PWR website was facing some technical problems. Mr. Dimock decided to call the PWR Office to learn how to proceed. The woman from the PWR office said she could deal with my request through phone and then asked to talk to me. Again, I’d have to speak English on the phone, and it still scares me to some extent. I hate it when I have to ask somebody to repeat a sentence because I didn’t understand it. If I had the sentence written, I’d be probably able to understand it. In other words, it’s a matter of being able to comprehend sounds rather than words. Anyway, I faced the challenge and talked to her. After three minutes, my assigned PWR quarter was changed (and I even received a compliment due to my good English. ‘You speak English very well, I can tell only by talking to you on the phone’, she said).”
What's the most important feature in language comprehension? Sounds, syntax or vocabulary? This was the question that opened our journey through the world of Linguistics here in this blog. Before drowning deep in the study of Linguistics, my answer was Sounds. Guess what? After almost two months, my answer is still SOUNDS!
After two months taking classes in English and surrounded by English speakers, now I feel much more comfortable with my listening skills. As I learned during our classes, the reason is that I got more accustomed to the environment where now I live, and to the (English) speakers that now I live with. That is to say that now I am used to the sounds they produce. It is natural that after some time I can understand them better. Accents do not bother me too much now, I can even notice then! I could also watch the electoral coverage on TV and understand clearly what was being said. The end of the Autumn Quarter is coming and now I understand almost everything that my professors say in class. The opportunity of living here broadened my capacity of adaptation to a variety of English speakers.
Before coming to Stanford, I had been studying English for almost nine years. I had a pretty good knowledge of the syntax and of the vocabulary of the English Language. However, my listening and speaking skills – the ones related to sounds – were only reasonable (in my personal evaluation). When I arrived here, it bothered me not to be able to understand everything people around me were saying. I didn’t like it either when people could not understand what I was trying to say. For example: last week, I went to FroSoCo to talk to a friend of mine, whose name is Caroline. As I didn’t know the number of her room, I had to ask for help. But nobody there knew the number of her room! The reason, I learned quickly, was that I was mispronouncing her name. I was pronouncing the third vowel as /i/ instead of /ai/. I knew her name (the vocabulary); the problem was lying on the sound. Eventually, I was able to find her – I could communicate well and solve the problem! I am realy happy to notice a fair amount of improvement in my “sound skills”, so to speak, during the last months – now I can even speak comfortably on the phone (so feel free to call me whenever you need)!
Best,
Nikolas
Monday, November 17, 2008
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Make a comment!
If you are reading this, leave me a message! You are welcome to comment on any of the previous (and future) posts of this blog.
Best,
Nikolas
Best,
Nikolas
Friday, November 7, 2008
Lexical differences across dialects!
Hi, again!
This week once again we have a very nice topic, which is lexical differences across dialects, and in order to discuss it I’d like to share with you some more (cool) information about the amazing country where I come from. As you all may know, Portuguese is a romance language derived from Latin that is currently the sixth most spoken language in the world. It originally comes from Portugal, but nowadays more than 80% of all Portuguese-speakers are Brazilian, which makes the Brazilian dialect the predominant one in the language (and I was very happy to see, when I arrived here, that Stanford acknowledges it by teaching the Brazilian dialect to students who want to learn our beautiful and sweet language. By the way, Prof. Lyris Wiedemann, director of the Portuguese Language program at Stanford, told me that the majority of students who want to learn Portuguese are interested in Brazilian issues).
In terms of comparison, we can say that the difference between European and Brazilian Portuguese is basically similar to the one between British and American English. It means that speakers of one dialect can understand speakers of the words (which is what characterizes a dialect, if I’m not mistaken), but they have some lexical differences. Even within the Brazilian variety of the language, though, it is possible to find different dialects.
Curitiba, the city where I was born and raised, has some very typical and unique words in its lexicon. One of them, for example, is “piá”. This word, that stands for “boy”, “guy” or something alike, is used essentially in my city. And it is used a lot. I often use it as a vocative to call my friends in Curitiba, for example. But a friend of mine from Minas Gerais (which is a Brazilian state of the Southeast region) had never heard this word before I tried to call his attention by using this word as a vocative, so he did not answer to me when I used it to call him. Later he told me that he didn’t think I was talking to him, which is interesting because I remember that it took me some time to realize that the problem was that he didn’t know the word.
Another curious feature of the Curitiba’s dialect is the common use of the word “daí” (that could be translated as “then”) in the end of the sentence, as an expletive word. I find it really interesting that we Curitibanos do have this trend in our dialect but I had never noticed it until it was pointed out through a character in a Brazilian TV show. This character is a maid called Bozena (she has Polish ancestry, just like me!) that comes from my state but works in Rio de Janeiro, in a middle-class family. As it is a humor TV show, she exaggerates the trend by saying “daí” in the end of almost every sentence she pronounces. We don’t do that, but we do use this word in the end of sentence, as a way to convey an idea of consequence. Again, when I went to Rio de Janeiro and started talking, people was impressed because in fact I do use this word (it was not just a delirium of the writers). In case you got curious and want to see this very funny character, here it is a youtube link (it’s in Portuguese, but if you don’t speak it anyway you can still try to hear this word in the end of her sentences. I guess that the IPA pronunciation for the word would be /dai/): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxIaY7Y3di0
Best,
Nikolas
This week once again we have a very nice topic, which is lexical differences across dialects, and in order to discuss it I’d like to share with you some more (cool) information about the amazing country where I come from. As you all may know, Portuguese is a romance language derived from Latin that is currently the sixth most spoken language in the world. It originally comes from Portugal, but nowadays more than 80% of all Portuguese-speakers are Brazilian, which makes the Brazilian dialect the predominant one in the language (and I was very happy to see, when I arrived here, that Stanford acknowledges it by teaching the Brazilian dialect to students who want to learn our beautiful and sweet language. By the way, Prof. Lyris Wiedemann, director of the Portuguese Language program at Stanford, told me that the majority of students who want to learn Portuguese are interested in Brazilian issues).
In terms of comparison, we can say that the difference between European and Brazilian Portuguese is basically similar to the one between British and American English. It means that speakers of one dialect can understand speakers of the words (which is what characterizes a dialect, if I’m not mistaken), but they have some lexical differences. Even within the Brazilian variety of the language, though, it is possible to find different dialects.
Curitiba, the city where I was born and raised, has some very typical and unique words in its lexicon. One of them, for example, is “piá”. This word, that stands for “boy”, “guy” or something alike, is used essentially in my city. And it is used a lot. I often use it as a vocative to call my friends in Curitiba, for example. But a friend of mine from Minas Gerais (which is a Brazilian state of the Southeast region) had never heard this word before I tried to call his attention by using this word as a vocative, so he did not answer to me when I used it to call him. Later he told me that he didn’t think I was talking to him, which is interesting because I remember that it took me some time to realize that the problem was that he didn’t know the word.
Another curious feature of the Curitiba’s dialect is the common use of the word “daí” (that could be translated as “then”) in the end of the sentence, as an expletive word. I find it really interesting that we Curitibanos do have this trend in our dialect but I had never noticed it until it was pointed out through a character in a Brazilian TV show. This character is a maid called Bozena (she has Polish ancestry, just like me!) that comes from my state but works in Rio de Janeiro, in a middle-class family. As it is a humor TV show, she exaggerates the trend by saying “daí” in the end of almost every sentence she pronounces. We don’t do that, but we do use this word in the end of sentence, as a way to convey an idea of consequence. Again, when I went to Rio de Janeiro and started talking, people was impressed because in fact I do use this word (it was not just a delirium of the writers). In case you got curious and want to see this very funny character, here it is a youtube link (it’s in Portuguese, but if you don’t speak it anyway you can still try to hear this word in the end of her sentences. I guess that the IPA pronunciation for the word would be /dai/): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxIaY7Y3di0
Best,
Nikolas
Dialect perception
Dear friends,
Hi! The theme of this week is to talk about potential experiments examining the perception of regional dialects, which is really nice, since my final project happens to be focused on perception issues.
Just to let you guys more aware of what I’m intending to do, here it is a basic description of my project (the first paragraph of my final project proposal):
“The purpose of my project is to investigate whether proficiency in a given language is essential for one to identify the different accents in this language. As we can notice by analyzing sound waves through Praat Software, speakers with different accents produce sound waves with different features that are related to such accents. My question is: are such differences so noticeable that these distinct sound waves are perceived as distinct sounds regardless of the listener or, instead, such differences are not so evident and as such rely on the knowledge of the language to be noticed?”
I can already tell some interesting facts related to dialect perception (and maybe to accent discrimination too) that happened during the first steps of my project. In order to answer the question that I proposed in my final project, I recorded five English female speakers reading a sentence for me. What was interesting is that, after I asked the girls to record a sentence for my Linguistics project, they replied with “But I don’t have an accent, is that OK?” or something alike. And it happened more than once! My guess is that, as we discussed in class, college students are generally worried about being discriminated for their origin. Not surprising, these two girls who claimed not to have a strong accent are not Californians. Still not surprising, some Californians told me that they do have an accent (and they actually went further, saying that they have a funny accent. Maybe this is why they say they don’t have an accent – they want to avoid this kind of assertion).
I found the results of the journal article we had to read this week interesting especially because they are applicable to the Brazilian accent-related reality. Look at the following Brazilian map that highlights the five different geographical regions of the country:
Source: http://www.bbportuguese.com/library/Map-brazil-state.bmp.
Notice the South of Brazil (the yellow region). I live in the state of Paraná (according to Wikipedia, pronounced [paɾaˈna]). For me, it is pretty clear that each state in the south of Brazil (Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul) has a different accent. The difference is evident for me. People from the Northeast (blue region) or even the Southeast (red region), though, do not see this difference so clearly. When I went to Rio de Janeiro, I was asked a couple of times if I am “gaúcho”, i.e., born in Rio Grande do Sul. A friend of mine from the state of Santa Catarina had a similar experience. On the other hand, I cannot say that I am able to identify the difference between the accents of Ceará and Bahia (which are two states of the Northeast region). As the research concludes, we tend to confuse accents that are not close to our reality.
Taking a step further, maybe this is why I am not entirely capable of identifying all the accents in English (even though some of them I do distinguish). Does it mean that my final project will lead me to conclude that people usually do not identify accents of a foreign language? Let’s wait for the results.
Hi! The theme of this week is to talk about potential experiments examining the perception of regional dialects, which is really nice, since my final project happens to be focused on perception issues.
Just to let you guys more aware of what I’m intending to do, here it is a basic description of my project (the first paragraph of my final project proposal):
“The purpose of my project is to investigate whether proficiency in a given language is essential for one to identify the different accents in this language. As we can notice by analyzing sound waves through Praat Software, speakers with different accents produce sound waves with different features that are related to such accents. My question is: are such differences so noticeable that these distinct sound waves are perceived as distinct sounds regardless of the listener or, instead, such differences are not so evident and as such rely on the knowledge of the language to be noticed?”
I can already tell some interesting facts related to dialect perception (and maybe to accent discrimination too) that happened during the first steps of my project. In order to answer the question that I proposed in my final project, I recorded five English female speakers reading a sentence for me. What was interesting is that, after I asked the girls to record a sentence for my Linguistics project, they replied with “But I don’t have an accent, is that OK?” or something alike. And it happened more than once! My guess is that, as we discussed in class, college students are generally worried about being discriminated for their origin. Not surprising, these two girls who claimed not to have a strong accent are not Californians. Still not surprising, some Californians told me that they do have an accent (and they actually went further, saying that they have a funny accent. Maybe this is why they say they don’t have an accent – they want to avoid this kind of assertion).
I found the results of the journal article we had to read this week interesting especially because they are applicable to the Brazilian accent-related reality. Look at the following Brazilian map that highlights the five different geographical regions of the country:
Source: http://www.bbportuguese.com/library/Map-brazil-state.bmp.
Notice the South of Brazil (the yellow region). I live in the state of Paraná (according to Wikipedia, pronounced [paɾaˈna]). For me, it is pretty clear that each state in the south of Brazil (Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul) has a different accent. The difference is evident for me. People from the Northeast (blue region) or even the Southeast (red region), though, do not see this difference so clearly. When I went to Rio de Janeiro, I was asked a couple of times if I am “gaúcho”, i.e., born in Rio Grande do Sul. A friend of mine from the state of Santa Catarina had a similar experience. On the other hand, I cannot say that I am able to identify the difference between the accents of Ceará and Bahia (which are two states of the Northeast region). As the research concludes, we tend to confuse accents that are not close to our reality.
Taking a step further, maybe this is why I am not entirely capable of identifying all the accents in English (even though some of them I do distinguish). Does it mean that my final project will lead me to conclude that people usually do not identify accents of a foreign language? Let’s wait for the results.
Acoustic Phonetics
Dear All,
Welcome to the world of acoustic phonetics. After having read some material about the theme, today I’m going to describe the results of a specific phonetics exercise that we were asked to do. This exercise consists on measuring F1 and F2 values for eight American English vowels after recording them in Praat.
Before talking about the results, I’ll try to summarize in a few words for those of you who are not accustomed with phonetics terminology what F1 and F2 are, based on the reading material. F1 stands for First Formant and F2 stands for Second Formant. Formants are characteristic pitches inherent to vowels that make them distinguishable to each other (there’s actually more than only two formants, but F1 and F2 are the ones phoneticians most commonly look at). In other words, by measuring this first there is how to analyze differences in wowels’ pronunciation, that is, accent-related differences.
In the following chart, the words I had to record, their representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and the values for the formants I found for my recordings through Praat are displayed (click on the image if it is too small):
First, I have to say that I found it somewhat complicated to measure Formant values in Praat. The software has a feature that gets F1 and F2 values automatically, but the problem is that the value changes significantly depending on where you click in the wavesound picture. Maybe it’s just me who don’t know exactly where to look for the values, but I’m not sure if my measures are entirely reliable. When I plugged in the values on the graph we were given, the points are not in remarkably different positions than the ones presented in the example graph on page 198.
The most interesting conclusion, for me, is that the points for “heed” and “hid” are very close. I think the reason is that I don’t see a significant difference in the pronunciation of these two words, maybe because the vowel “ɪ” is not common in Portuguese, as opposed to “i" (by the way, the letter “i" in Portuguese in pronounced like /i/).
Best,
Nikolas
Welcome to the world of acoustic phonetics. After having read some material about the theme, today I’m going to describe the results of a specific phonetics exercise that we were asked to do. This exercise consists on measuring F1 and F2 values for eight American English vowels after recording them in Praat.
Before talking about the results, I’ll try to summarize in a few words for those of you who are not accustomed with phonetics terminology what F1 and F2 are, based on the reading material. F1 stands for First Formant and F2 stands for Second Formant. Formants are characteristic pitches inherent to vowels that make them distinguishable to each other (there’s actually more than only two formants, but F1 and F2 are the ones phoneticians most commonly look at). In other words, by measuring this first there is how to analyze differences in wowels’ pronunciation, that is, accent-related differences.
In the following chart, the words I had to record, their representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and the values for the formants I found for my recordings through Praat are displayed (click on the image if it is too small):
First, I have to say that I found it somewhat complicated to measure Formant values in Praat. The software has a feature that gets F1 and F2 values automatically, but the problem is that the value changes significantly depending on where you click in the wavesound picture. Maybe it’s just me who don’t know exactly where to look for the values, but I’m not sure if my measures are entirely reliable. When I plugged in the values on the graph we were given, the points are not in remarkably different positions than the ones presented in the example graph on page 198.
The most interesting conclusion, for me, is that the points for “heed” and “hid” are very close. I think the reason is that I don’t see a significant difference in the pronunciation of these two words, maybe because the vowel “ɪ” is not common in Portuguese, as opposed to “i" (by the way, the letter “i" in Portuguese in pronounced like /i/).
Best,
Nikolas
Accent discrimination
Friends of our blog,
Hi again! This week our focus will be in accent discrimination. Professor Sumner asked us to take a quiz at http://www.uiowa.edu/~c103112/profile.html and then to try to guess the speaker’s race/ethnicity based solely on a recording of their pronunciation of a given sentence. In other words, we have to guess their origin based on their accents.
I found this quiz particularly interesting because the experiment I’m thinking of for my final project relies on the same methodology (which is to have a listener answering questions about the speakers based solely on recordings of their accents. The purpose is a little bit different: to evaluate whether one who doesn’t speak a certain language is able to distinguish accents of this language). And I actually did pretty well in the quiz: out of 10 speakers, I guessed the origin of 7 of them correctly:
From the chart, it is noticeable that I had trouble with identifying the origin of Hispanic speakers. I’d say that this is mainly due to my expectation that Hispanic speakers would have a strong accent, and the ones in the quiz didn’t have it at all (at least, not strong for me). I know some Hispanic speakers whose accent is very typical, in the sense that it keeps most of the sounds of the Spanish language. On the other hand, I did pretty well at identifying Middle Eastern speakers, and I think that the reason for that is the fact that these speakers do have a strong typical accent. This is quite interesting because it reminds me that, when I was taking an English class back in Brazil earlier this year, we listened to a Middle Eastern speaker in an listening exercise and in fact it was not easy to understand what he was saying due to his accent. Specifically, I remember that his pronunciation of the words “replenishment” and “soul” was very curious. I’ve just noticed the very same thing with speakers 7 and 10 (to be quite honest, I cannot see a remarkable difference between the Indian and the Middle Eastern accent, but somehow I was able to guess each one correctly).
Best,
Nikolas
Hi again! This week our focus will be in accent discrimination. Professor Sumner asked us to take a quiz at http://www.uiowa.edu/~c103112/profile.html and then to try to guess the speaker’s race/ethnicity based solely on a recording of their pronunciation of a given sentence. In other words, we have to guess their origin based on their accents.
I found this quiz particularly interesting because the experiment I’m thinking of for my final project relies on the same methodology (which is to have a listener answering questions about the speakers based solely on recordings of their accents. The purpose is a little bit different: to evaluate whether one who doesn’t speak a certain language is able to distinguish accents of this language). And I actually did pretty well in the quiz: out of 10 speakers, I guessed the origin of 7 of them correctly:
From the chart, it is noticeable that I had trouble with identifying the origin of Hispanic speakers. I’d say that this is mainly due to my expectation that Hispanic speakers would have a strong accent, and the ones in the quiz didn’t have it at all (at least, not strong for me). I know some Hispanic speakers whose accent is very typical, in the sense that it keeps most of the sounds of the Spanish language. On the other hand, I did pretty well at identifying Middle Eastern speakers, and I think that the reason for that is the fact that these speakers do have a strong typical accent. This is quite interesting because it reminds me that, when I was taking an English class back in Brazil earlier this year, we listened to a Middle Eastern speaker in an listening exercise and in fact it was not easy to understand what he was saying due to his accent. Specifically, I remember that his pronunciation of the words “replenishment” and “soul” was very curious. I’ve just noticed the very same thing with speakers 7 and 10 (to be quite honest, I cannot see a remarkable difference between the Indian and the Middle Eastern accent, but somehow I was able to guess each one correctly).Best,
Nikolas
We are back!!!
Dear readers,
"Brazilian accent at Stanford" is back. I had a hard time with the blog server during the past weeks. Due to some unknown reason, my blog was (unfairly) identified as a spam blog (automatically generated by spam programs). As a result, I was not allowed to create new post until they verify that our blog is not a spam blog at all, which took a while (more than I expected). But now everything is finally just fine, so now I can post all the texts I should have been able to post during the last weeks. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it was definitely not my fault.
Best,
Nikolas
"Brazilian accent at Stanford" is back. I had a hard time with the blog server during the past weeks. Due to some unknown reason, my blog was (unfairly) identified as a spam blog (automatically generated by spam programs). As a result, I was not allowed to create new post until they verify that our blog is not a spam blog at all, which took a while (more than I expected). But now everything is finally just fine, so now I can post all the texts I should have been able to post during the last weeks. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it was definitely not my fault.
Best,
Nikolas
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