More from Prof. Anthony Esolen:
One of the features of my current History of the English Language class at Magdalen College is the attention I pay to how the speakers of one language hear or do not hear the sounds of another language, and "translate" those sounds into something that makes sense to them.
I remember the last time I was in Italy (1998, alas), I was playing the mischievous boy-professor, teaching a bunch of kids a little about baseball, by pitching a soccer ball at them against the back side of the village church, while they tried to hit it with a broomstick. When they missed, I called out, "Strike!" -- in the way that we English speakers have, not aspirating the final consonant. The kids heard it as "STRI" -- no K. If you want to imitate a Generic Furrener Speaking English, one thing to do is to aspirate every final consonant. Another thing to do is to reduce the English diphthongs O (O + OO in American; EH + OO in most British accents) and AY (AI + EE) to simple vowels. Try it ...
Anyway, when you don't have a certain sound in your language, it can be hard to hear it at all, or not to mishear it. Case in point: Welsh LL, the voiceless L, is a rare sound in the world's languages (though I am told that perhaps it is the "hissing" sound represented in Hebrew by the letter Shin, with the dot on the top left). English speakers could not make out what the Welshmen were saying when they uttered the name LLWYD (GRAY), and turned it sometimes into FLOYD. Americans in the southwest found it hard to hear the lightly pronounced intervocalic D in Spanish JUZGADO, so we ended up with HOOSEGOW... And of course English and French and Spanish and Portuguese speakers almost always misheard native Indian words when those languages had sounds that the European languages did not have as phonemes, such as the glottal stop, or the uvular stop now transcribed as Q, which Europeans will always render as K (C).
The English TH, meanwhile, is a somewhat rare phoneme in the world's languages, and is often heard as some other spirant pronounced near the front of the mouth, usually as F or V. This is true even of Cockney English (EARTH > "URF"), but it was also true as the Indo European original veered off into the Italic branch. Latin has F in place of the original TH, and that sometimes plays the devil with us as we try to find cognates: thus Latin FUMUS, SMOKE, is cognate with Greek THYMOS (and English DUST), and Latin FACERE is cognate with Greek TITHENAI and English DO. But the same thing happened in Russian: Greek THEODOROS > Russian FYODOR; Hebrew MARTHA > Russian MARFA, and so on.
That's how I think of the business of articulatory phonetics. Example: Indo European words that begin with W correspond to words in Welsh that begin with GW. Why? What does the G have to do with the W? Oddly enough, the late Latin that Italian came from did not have words beginning with GW + a vowel, until the speakers adopted German words beginning with W, and THEN they hardened the W to GW, or that is how they heard it to begin with. So we have Germanic WASTE, but Italian GUASTARE, or Germanic WALTER, but Italian GUALTIERI, or Germanic WAR, but Italian GUERRA. Similarly, Latin VULTUS, COUNTENANCE, from the same ancient root that gives us Welsh GWELD, to SEE; Indo European WER-, MAN (Latin VIR, Anglo Saxon WER), but Welsh GWR...
One thing we can do that might help some students learn a foreign language is to instruct them a little in how sounds are made -- how their own sounds are made, because we take those things for granted. Or this may just be my being a geek about phonetics.....