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Comment by helpbygrace | Hacker News Reader

As I am Korean, I also feels same difficulty for English sound between 'r' and 'l'. 'f' and 'p'. because in Korean, 'r' and 'l' have same sound 'ㄹ'

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Yes, that’s exactly the same problem illustrated the other way around. Japanese speakers also fail to make the /l/ and /r/ distinction and it’s a rather stereotypical feature of a Korean or Japanese accent in English. Japanese happens to have sounds for both /f/ and /p/ unlike Korean, but not for /f/ and /h/. So you’ll hear Japanese speakers of English having a hard time producing those two sounds distinctly just like Korean speakers have a hard time with /f/ and /p/.

The Korean consonantal distinctions are particular tricky, though, because it’s one consonant in English being not two sounds in Korean but three.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this mis/near-mapping of phoneme sets can easily result in fantastic corruptions of words as they migrate through various language "lenses" then when reintroduced to their origins sound nothing like the original word!

e.g. Moving through a couple cultures... r->l->n and b->p->f or b->v->w might turn "rollerblade" into "lolaweulad"

Brazilians pronounce "vicks vapo rub" like "vicky-vapo-ruby". That one had me in tears the first time I heard it.

Actually, that’s more or less how the phonology of languages change internally over long periods of time [1]: sets of phonemes merge, split, appear, and disappear. The particular forces driving these changes are varied and complicated, but particular sounds that have adjacencies on various axes twist and enjoin and diverge, dancing about according to constraints that produce surface complexity like in a multibody system. Something about the way I’ve always envisioned phonological change makes me think of Voronoi diagrams [2].

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_change

[2] http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ex/voronoi.html

Which is, in fact, strange. Most languages do not have the v/w distinction, but very few non-native english speakers confuse v with w, especially in write. But Koreans and Japanese tend to confuse r and l even in write.

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