Does the cow say “meuh” or “moo”?

My corrective phonetics teacher once asked us this eccentric question: if an American cow grazing peacefully in a meadow came across a Franco-Ontarian cow, what would she answer to his cry: “Uh! “? Would she compliment her on her lovely French accent?

You will understand that such a situation would never occur as cows all over the world make much the same cry. The perceived differences have nothing to do with where they come from, but everything to do with how we as a speaker of a language perceive this cry. An English speaker passing near the field that day would claim that the moo corresponds to something like the consonant m followed by the vowel oo. This is explained by the fact that he will associate the cry of the cow with the closest sound in English. In the same way, a French speaker will rather associate the vowel with the eu sound, a vowel frequently used in French.

The principle of the phonetic sieve (Nicolas Sergeevich Troubetzkoy) establishes that a person without a sound in his mother tongue (MT) will associate the most similar one with a sound heard. This would explain why a French speaker will associate the sound th English with the sound t French. Speakers of a language are therefore not really deaf, but their brains are sometimes unable to discern foreign sound.

The person who hears a foreign language is deaf to the identification and understanding of sounds. Nicolas Sergeevich Troubetzkoy (1890-1938)

This story is a perfect illustration of the challenges that await learners of a foreign language in a situation of understanding or producing the target language. The spoken word will be “heard” or “said” differently depending on the phonological system we have in our MT. As an example, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a Mexican who can rely on a 5-vowel phonological system. When communicating with a French speaker, we can easily see the difficulties he will encounter in front of the 16 vowels in French!

In the same sense, an English speaker, who can count on a solid phonological system of 20 vowels, but different from those of French, will have to become familiar with the vowels of French if he does not want to speak like a Spanish cow!

[1] Principes de phonologie, 1938.

[2] Benoît Tardif, chargé d’enseignement à l’Université Laval.

Image : Image par R_Winkelmann de Pixabay

Written by Amélie Lachance

Adapted in English by Lisa Francesca Archambault

Image : Image par R_Winkelmann de Pixabay