If English does not distinguish between the ㅅ in “soft” and the ㅆ in “sun” then wouldn’t we say those distinct consonants are allophones? The body text is literally the “they are the same picture” meme since 살 and 쌀 are obviously and notoriously different words that are only distinguished by the one consonant and are usually the go-to word pair for a native to again try to distinguish the sounds that I’ve been unable to distinguish for over a decade. I’m gonna cry.
If English does not distinguish between the ㅅ in “soft” and the ㅆ in “sun” then wouldn’t we say those distinct consonants are allophones?
If the sound represented by ㅆ [s͈] even appears in English (I have my doubts), they would be allophones in English, while in Korean they’re distinctive sounds associated with different phonemes. Like, what one language considers allophones doesn’t coincide with what another does, you know?
And what you posted in the OP proves that they aren’t allophones in Korean, as their difference conveys different words.
I think you understand what I mean but something about how I wrote it confused you. Would it make more sense if instead of “language” I said “native language”?
Yes, both ㅅ and ㅆ occur in English, that’s why some English words are represented by one consonant or the other when written in Hangul. Yes, they are allophones in English. Yes, they are NOT allophones in Korean. And, yep! This meme is about how an L1 English speaker struggles to distinguish the two consonants when speaking Korean.
Does that make sense? I’m not sure which part suggested that they would be allophones in Korean - I guess I assumed too much context >_< The reason it’s so damn hard to learn the difference is partially because the 살/쌀 dichotomy isn’t as well-known to non-natives, I guess.
I think that the big key here is to highlight that allophones are language-dependent, like you’re doing in this comment already. And yes, the meme does make sense now!
Hawaiian has barely any consonants, so k, kh, g, gh, q, t, d, ʈ, … are all allophones no matter which language we are talking about? That’s not how this works. It would work when talking about words loaned into Hawaiian but not when talking about another language altogether.
And allophones aren’t necessarily difficult to distinguish. German has 2 versions of <ch> ([x] and [ç]) depending on the preceding vowel. Also we have quite a few realizations of /r/ (not as many of Dutch though) easy to tell apart and deduct roughly where someone is from. You’re just using the word wrong.
I don’t know where you got the impression that I said that if something is an allophone in one language it’s an allophone in all languages. Jeez!
I think that this impression is mostly from the fact that your post doesn’t make any reference to English (or another language lacking the distinction), so people are incorrectly associating what you said with Korean instead, and incorrectly assuming ignorance.
I don’t think that people would misread you if the meme said
“When you have to distinguish two sounds from a language that are allophones in yours”. // 살 and 쌀 sound the same for me!
That said, I fully agree with you that people aren’t spending enough time trying to understand each other here.
Ah, thanks for the info (from another comment) on Korean rendering some English /s/ as one or another consonant! It hints that English at least comes close to the tense-S in some situations.
If English does not distinguish between the ㅅ in “soft” and the ㅆ in “sun” then wouldn’t we say those distinct consonants are allophones? The body text is literally the “they are the same picture” meme since 살 and 쌀 are obviously and notoriously different words that are only distinguished by the one consonant and are usually the go-to word pair for a native to again try to distinguish the sounds that I’ve been unable to distinguish for over a decade. I’m gonna cry.
If the sound represented by ㅆ [s͈] even appears in English (I have my doubts), they would be allophones in English, while in Korean they’re distinctive sounds associated with different phonemes. Like, what one language considers allophones doesn’t coincide with what another does, you know?
And what you posted in the OP proves that they aren’t allophones in Korean, as their difference conveys different words.
I think you understand what I mean but something about how I wrote it confused you. Would it make more sense if instead of “language” I said “native language”?
Yes, both ㅅ and ㅆ occur in English, that’s why some English words are represented by one consonant or the other when written in Hangul. Yes, they are allophones in English. Yes, they are NOT allophones in Korean. And, yep! This meme is about how an L1 English speaker struggles to distinguish the two consonants when speaking Korean.
Does that make sense? I’m not sure which part suggested that they would be allophones in Korean - I guess I assumed too much context >_< The reason it’s so damn hard to learn the difference is partially because the 살/쌀 dichotomy isn’t as well-known to non-natives, I guess.
I think that the big key here is to highlight that allophones are language-dependent, like you’re doing in this comment already. And yes, the meme does make sense now!
Hawaiian has barely any consonants, so k, kh, g, gh, q, t, d, ʈ, … are all allophones no matter which language we are talking about? That’s not how this works. It would work when talking about words loaned into Hawaiian but not when talking about another language altogether.
And allophones aren’t necessarily difficult to distinguish. German has 2 versions of <ch> ([x] and [ç]) depending on the preceding vowel. Also we have quite a few realizations of /r/ (not as many of Dutch though) easy to tell apart and deduct roughly where someone is from. You’re just using the word wrong.
I don’t know where you got the impression that I said that if something is an allophone in one language it’s an allophone in all languages. Jeez!
I think that this impression is mostly from the fact that your post doesn’t make any reference to English (or another language lacking the distinction), so people are incorrectly associating what you said with Korean instead, and incorrectly assuming ignorance.
I don’t think that people would misread you if the meme said
That said, I fully agree with you that people aren’t spending enough time trying to understand each other here.
Ah, thanks for the info (from another comment) on Korean rendering some English /s/ as one or another consonant! It hints that English at least comes close to the tense-S in some situations.