As an English speaker, I’ve wondered why other languages, say Polish, have oddly placed letters in their names. Bunches of consonants together like “trz” or “cwk”, and when pronounced it’s nothing like I would imagine. This has always perplexed me, in fact. Trying to learn French has really highlighted that, because the pronunciations are almost but not quite what I would expect based on my experience with Spanish and English.
Well this is the thing I learned/realized, the other day — and bear with me because it starts banal and obvious, but I need to build to my conclusion which is really quite good. My point is this: the alphabet is just a series of symbols, nothing more or less.
Furthermore, the English alphabet is not the same as, say, the French alphabet. They may look the same and seem to correspond, but they are absolutely different. Let me explain, because this is really neat.
The characters we know and love have been borrowed for millennia. They have been modified, reordered, and repurposed. English-speakers have, over time, chosen certain of them to represent certain sounds, based on the sounds in their language. Furthermore, sometimes there’s another sound that developed in the language but lacked a character, such as the “th” sound in “theater”. In such a case, two symbols are used to represent the sound.
For example, it would be perfectly valid for us to have taken the letter “K” and said, “We already use ‘C’ for a harsh sound, why don’t we only use ‘C’ for that? Then we can represent the ‘th’ sound with the letter ‘K’! No lost sounds!” That’s what happened in other languages: they didn’t need certain letters to be used in the same way other languages used them, so they were appropriated to represent different sounds.* Or they did something like English did with “th” and caused the two letters together to represent some other sound that english doesn’t use. Spanish could just as easily have said the combination “NL” was pronounced like “ñ”.
All of this is a long way of saying the letter “A” has no meaning in and of itself. It doesn’t sound like anything, there is no “essence of the sound of A”. Or any other letter, which is why “H” represents the sound at the begging of “heather” in English, but in Polish is concussive and guttural, pronounced like the “ch” at the end of the English word “loch”.
Lastly, if you can keep this in your mind and reframe how you look at language, it will open your understanding of the language and its pronunciation. How hard is it to pronounce the letter “n” in French, as an English speaker? Kind of hard. The thing is, though, that you’re not pronouncing the letter “N” in French, you are actually pronouncing the French sound represented by the letter “N”.
It’s a different perspective. You aren’t making an English “N” sound different. No, you’re producing an entirely French sound that doesn’t exist in English. It’s brand new and just so happens to sort of sound like the letter “N” in English — but they’re not the same at all. Saying that they are the same is like trying to understand a foreign culture on your culture’s terms.
Furthermore, if you approach pronunciation in the manner of “it’s just like this English sound, but slightly different”, you’re translating as you go. You can’t gain fluency in a language by internally translating it to your language as you listen and respond; you have to speak in that language as a first-class device. It’s the same with the sounds. You have to take the language on its own terms. Don’t be provincial: learn the alphabet.
And that’s all I have to say about that. Don’t even get me started on French counting.
