살 and 쌀 are the same word
You must log in or # to comment.
Comments are so much “That’s the joke.”
I feel you, OP. When you can’t hear it, you can’t hear it.
ITT: people not knowing the difference between allophone and homophone.
ITT: people not knowing the difference between allophone and homophone.
I don’t think that it’s the case here. It’s simply that OP’s meme leaves a lot of stuff up to context, and people are filling the gaps with assumptions. We [people in general] shouldn’t assume ignorance out of simple miscommunication.
In case someone here does not know the difference:
- Allophones - sounds associated with the same phoneme in a certain language. For example, in English [pʰ] (as in “pit”) and [p] (as in “spit”) are allophones, as they convey the same phoneme /p/.
- Homophones - different words that sound the same. For example, in English “two” and “too” are homophones for most speakers, as they’re typically pronounced [tʰu̟ː] and parsed as /tuː/.
I don’t get it. A little more context would be appreciated. Are they pronounced the same or mean the same or both?
They aren’t the same.
살 /sal/ “meat” is pronounced with [sʰ]. It’s roughly like the “ssh” in “grasshopper”.
쌀 /s͈al/ “uncooked rice” uses [s͈] instead. It’s a “tense” consonant; if I got it right the main difference is faucalised voice, you’re supposed to lower the larynx a bit while speaking it.
Since the difference yields different words, they’re a minimal pair so they aren’t allophones but different phonemes. If you speak Korean (I don’t) the difference between those two is on the same level as the one between English “bot” vs. “pot”, or between “bit” and “beet”. However since the contrast isn’t common out there they sound similar for non-speakers, and I think this to be what OP is trying to convey.
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.
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.
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.
