Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Accents

if you are acting, you would need to put an authentic accent. To do the latter is not "learn persian accent in 21 days". One has to know: the inventory of phonemes; allophones; syllabification; whether stress-timed; rhythm, if any, etc.

When people learn L2 (second language), they map phonemes and allophones of L1 to L2: this leads to accent. Unless you are trained in phonetics, you assume that the inventory of phonemes is invariant across languages.

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