09-16-2003, 02:42 PM
I'm not a linguist, but I understand that English, Spanish, French, etc are more vowel-oriented than many other languages.
I lived in Guatemala for a time, and was fascinated by speakers of the indigenous languages (Quiche and Mam in the areas I lived, Cakchiquel and Kekchi in some other areas) who learned Spanish as a second language.
Those languages rely almost entirely on consonants, vowels are a bit of an afterthought. They have words which are all but impossible to pronounce for non-native speakers (with large numbers of T, Z, K, and Q, often stacked 4 consonants deep. Try pronouncing tztq a few time).
Many speakers of these languages had great difficulty in mastering the vowel-matching of articles that you have to do in Spanish. These speakers also tended to ignore word-end vowels in Spanish. "Mesa" (table) became "Mes", and they sometimes cut off the consonant earlier, so it sounded more like "Mes' ". And many of these speakers just used "el" for all nouns (instead of "el" for masculine nouns and "la" for feminine nouns) so to say the table, they would say "el mes' ". I found it fascsinating -- it was a very different problem than native speakers of English, who tend to run into other problems in learning Spanish.
I lived in Guatemala for a time, and was fascinated by speakers of the indigenous languages (Quiche and Mam in the areas I lived, Cakchiquel and Kekchi in some other areas) who learned Spanish as a second language.
Those languages rely almost entirely on consonants, vowels are a bit of an afterthought. They have words which are all but impossible to pronounce for non-native speakers (with large numbers of T, Z, K, and Q, often stacked 4 consonants deep. Try pronouncing tztq a few time).
Many speakers of these languages had great difficulty in mastering the vowel-matching of articles that you have to do in Spanish. These speakers also tended to ignore word-end vowels in Spanish. "Mesa" (table) became "Mes", and they sometimes cut off the consonant earlier, so it sounded more like "Mes' ". And many of these speakers just used "el" for all nouns (instead of "el" for masculine nouns and "la" for feminine nouns) so to say the table, they would say "el mes' ". I found it fascsinating -- it was a very different problem than native speakers of English, who tend to run into other problems in learning Spanish.