살 and 쌀 are the same word

  • jbrains@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    6·
    2 years ago

    Comments are so much “That’s the joke.”

    I feel you, OP. When you can’t hear it, you can’t hear it.

  • recursive_recursion [they/them]@programming.devEnglish
    82·
    2 years ago

    hate to do the um ackshully meme

    but ㅅ has a softer ‘s’ pronounciation whereas ㅆ has a more excentuated SS sound where you move air with the bottom and top of your teeth put together when spoken

    for the actual words themselves 살 is like the fat/skin of something and 쌀 is rice, def don’t want to mix up the two🤗

    • TimewornTraveler@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      i still dont hear the difference. its been over a decade

      and im not sure why this is an ‘um actually’ since that’s literally the point of the meme, bruthm! 😜

  • lugal@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    5·
    2 years ago

    I don’t get it. A little more context would be appreciated. Are they pronounced the same or mean the same or both?

      • Dasus@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        Oh it’s so hard sometimes to get these differences because one just… doesn’t get it. Doesn’t have experience of the difference.

        In Finnish vowel length matters a lot, and when there are non-native speakers, it’s painfully obvious, as that’s something that’s hard to “get right” if you haven’t been exposed to the difference since you were a kid.

        It’s probably a somewhat subjective feeling of mine, but I’m pretty sure it’s easier to pass as a native speaker of English to English native speakers than it would be to do the same for Finnish. Similarly I’d have a lot of trouble learning the tonal and other minor differences in lots of Asian languages as Finnish or English or any other language I speak doesn’t really utilise them as much. So I’m “deaf” to them. For now.

          • Dasus@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            2 years ago

            My personal example of that is from Italian (L2): it took me a few years to be able to reliably distinguish pairs like “pena” (pity) and “penna” (feather), simply because Portuguese (L1) doesn’t care about consonant+vowel length.

            I’d like to assume you changed the words of the mishap, and you we’re actually in a restaurant, and instead of ordering “penne arrabbiata”, you asked for an angry penis, “pene arrabbiata”.

            Like Tuukka there in a reply above this pointed out, the vowel length in the word “tapaan sinut” and “tapan sinut” in Finnish is very important, as the first one is “i will meet you” and the second one is “I will kill you”. You can also change the consonants while having the same vowels if you just use the lemma of the word. “Tappaa” = to kill, “tapaa” = to meet

            And a habit as in a custom, tradition, personal habit, would be “tapa”, which is actually a synonym for “kill” in imperative form.

            I like to imagine how fucking hard it would be to learn Finnish and thank my lucky stars I’ll never have to.

          • TimewornTraveler@lemm.eeOPEnglish
            2·
            2 years ago

            Yup - we train ourselves to ignore distinctions as “not meaningful” because of our native languages, and then when we learn another language, one that uses those distinctions, it bites us back. You can get it later on, mind you, but it’s always a bit of a pain.

            Yep, this is exactly what I’ve been doing through. I need to find an instance in English where a word uses the 싸 sound (ssa) but I still haven’t found any yet!

        • TimewornTraveler@lemm.eeOPEnglish
          3·
          2 years ago

          Oh it’s so hard sometimes to get these differences because one just… doesn’t get it. Doesn’t have experience of the difference.

          Yep. I literally do not hear different sounds.

          The following vowels sound kind of different! I saw something that suggested the F1 or F3 vowel frequency is how natives hear the difference, but I’m not sure if that’s the whole story.

        • Tuukka R@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          Regarding difference in vowel length… Use a machine translator of your choice and translate these two phrases from Finnish to your mother tongue:

          • Tapaan sinut.
          • Tapan sinut.

          Safe travels!

          • Dasus@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            Haha. Nice one.

            Especially because getting the vowels right is usually pretty challenging to like, English speakers.

        • lugal@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          That’s not how allophones work. As a German native speaker, I have problems with the English vowel system and voice consonants in coda position (end of the syllable), still you won’t find me making a meme how bad, bat, bed, bet are all the same and allophones. Maybe self ironic “they are the same picture” but not using a scientific word wrongly. This is a meme community and I’m happy there are posts at all, but this isn’t for bet linguistics. We are better than that.

          • TimewornTraveler@lemm.eeOPEnglish
            2·
            2 years ago

            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.

              • TimewornTraveler@lemm.eeOPEnglish
                3·
                2 years ago

                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.

            • lugal@sopuli.xyzEnglish
              13·
              2 years ago

              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.

              • TimewornTraveler@lemm.eeOPEnglish
                1·
                2 years ago

                are all allophones no matter which language we are talking about?

                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!

                • lugal@sopuli.xyzEnglish
                  12·
                  2 years ago

                  But English is measure of all things?

                  You still seem to think that allophone is when they sound the same. That’s not even part of the definition. In my last comment I elaborated about allophones that sound quite distinct for native speakers. Let me now explain what allophone really is:

                  One straightforward definition (that has its flaws) is that allophone is when there are no minimal pairs. You literally gave a minimal pair.

                  You can even have two identical phones belonging to different phonemes. German devoices final consonants so /d/ has the allophones [d] and [th]. In effect, “Rat” and “Rad” both have final [th] while being allophones of /t/ and /d/ respectively.

  • Tuukka R@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    In Ukrainian cats (кіт / kit) and whales (кит / kyt) are the same thing, if you ask my ears. As are being hungry (голодний / holodnyj) and cold (холодний / kholodnyj).

    I can never know if their whale is hungry or if their cat feels cold.

  • sik0fewl@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    Try looking for a minimal pairs Anki deck to help train ear to hear the difference.