Question:
I have never been able to figure out why Germans who learn English have a
hard time with English "v," saying things like "wery" for "very." German
already has a sound exactly like English "v" ("w" as in Wasser). It
seems to me that a German would be more likely to say "ferry," like Dutch
speakers of English often do. Does anyone have any insight into this?
Answer:
The mental phonological constructs of language aren't sounds, but a group
of sounds which are felt by most speakers to be equivalent. That group of
sounds which a particular speaker considers to be equivalent are called a
phoneme. It's a little bit like getting the scientific notion of a
measurement. A measurement can never be a single number, but must be a
centroid (most likely value) and an error. Similarly, a phoneme has a
most likely value, and a space around it in several dimensions. Any sound
in that space is considered by its user to be equivalent. The space is
widened by several factors, including the adjacent phonemes, which affect
the phoneme, position in the word (particularly inital versus final) and
by dialectical variation.
The typical German space for German w includes English /w/ and /v/. Both
because there is no contrast in German, and because of dialectical
variation.
Therefore, unless a German student is taught very early to make the
contrast, the student is likely to perceive the two sounds as equivalent.
In production, the German's /w-v/ varies over the space of English /v/ and
/w/ according to context, or perhaps even randomly. Many (maybe most)
errors in learning a second language's pronunciation come from
inconsistent phoneme boundaries between first and second langages.
English speakers have a similar problem sorting out French u and ou or
German üh or uh (/y/ and /u/ respectively) because English /u/ (as in
rule) wanders all over the place by dialect, and there is no contrasting
/y/ in English.
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