A Squirrel in Bru-Jim

I recently read an article on line called Why Germans Can't Say "Squirrel."  I think that was probably what got me thinking about Richard Ho – probably what led to yesterday’s post.

In my story yesterday, I had my roommate, Richard Ho,  pronouncing Rs for Ls, and vice-versa.  While that may fit the stereotype Westerners have of Orientals, it is not actually true.  That is, the story was true; the pronunciation – not exactly.

It may sound that way to us, but the truth of the matter is that there is a consonant in both Chinese and Japanese that falls somewhere between an English R and the English L. 

Quoting Wikipedia “English has two liquid phonemes, one lateral, /l/ and one rhotic, /r/, exemplified in the words led and red. In some languages, such as Japanese, there is one liquid phoneme which may have both lateral and rhotic allophones.” 

Trust me – that pretty much says the same thing I was trying to tell you. Orientals speaking English do not differentiate between R and L; they substitute that same sound for both.

I referred to spoken Chinese in an earlier paragraph, but there are several Chinese languages – about two billion speak Mandarin (the most widely spoken language in the world) another  70 million speak Cantonese, and 90 million or so speak Wu, the language of  Shanghai.  There are multiple other languages such as Min-Nan and Xiang that account for a few hundred thousand other “Chinese” speakers.

After a semester with Richard, I could almost get the pronunciation of that Chinese consonant right, but not quite.  I think it could probably be used as a shibboleth.