Ana has gotten better about writing her journal lately.

[conuly]

This is due to two things: First, I showed her how to do an outline and made her do one with me before writing her journal, and second, I made a rule about fixing mistakes AFTER we write, and made her sit down with me to edit her journal every day.

Now, the outline concept was a big help, first because it helps Ana organize her thoughts, and also because Ana HATES writing an outline and will jump right into journal time if it lets her avoid it.

The editing was also a big help, first because otherwise Ana would get hung up with paralyzing fear that she was about to make a mistake, and secondly because once she's done (warts and all) she realizes she just doesn't care. (The fact that she doesn't care is probably helped by the fact that I only know one way to edit, and it's not very nice. So once she remembers that - wow, look, time has flown, she wants to go out and play! Truthfully, I don't want to edit her journal EITHER, so whatever.)

So lately I haven't had to stand over her as she writes her journal entries, and boy, how refreshing that is! But maybe I need to pay a bit more attention.

See, she's SUPPOSED to write about her day. Every day. (Actually, she's supposed to write about school. After thinking it over, Ana's come to the conclusion that this is because her principal is a mean meaniepants, but she tries not to hold it against the woman.) Now, she's tried writing about how she hates writing about her day, and she's tried ignoring this rule and making up stories instead, and I guess today she decided to try the passive-aggressive approach:

I whet to the stor after I cam came out of the skool and my sister. after that wegot mulberries. when we got home I did my journal. I rote about mulberries. here it is. we got home befor it raid. after I finish I will go out and dants.

She also drew a carefully labeled picture with tunder, a clawd, raie (rain), linke (lightning), her huse (itself with a labeled windoe, Eva, and dor), and of course "Me"... a child standing directly under two bolts of linke.

I'm not sure where she gets the linke spelling for lightning. Even raie makes sense, she just forgot about the "n" in there, but... linke?

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Okay, when you say T. rex slowly and distinctly, is there still a ch- sound in there?

For me, going from the t- sound to the r- sound is automatic, and my jaw/teeth position doesn't change at all between them - the only thing that moves is the tip of my tongue. In order to put a ch- sound in between them, I've got to move my jaw in what seems an odd way.

I suspect you and I have enough differences in the way we pronounce just about everything, to delight the heart of 'enry 'iggens. I have to admit, regional dialects, slang, archaisms and colloquialisms delight my heart as well; the cool thing about English is that it's really at least hundred languages all rolled into one.

[conuly]

Hmmm. Okay, when you say T. rex slowly and distinctly, is there still a ch- sound in there?

No, but that's because I'm not saying Trex. I'm saying tee rex. If I were saying Trex and using the T not as an initial but as a sound in and of itself, it'd be different.

My teeth and jaw don't move when making t, r, or sh - but my tongue does. If I go t, t, t my tongue is right behind my teeth. If I go sh, sh, sh my tongue is right behind the alveolar ridge. And if I go r, r, r my tongue is behind the alveolar ridge, but pointing upward. (Bit hard to explain - it's "further back" than when going sh.) So in between t and r my tongue HAS TO move into the sh position.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

What this tells me is that you and I don't pronounce our r-s in the same way. When I pronounce it, my tongue doesn't touch my palate at all, so there isn't any sh- position between t- and r-.

I know some people who barely pronounce their r-s even in words like road-race, and not at all in words like car-door; then again I know some others who distinctly pronounce them, and even throw them into words like wash that don't actually have them. I bet there's a huge body of literature on this variation in the formal linguistics research.

Ack; gotta go to work, but this has been most fascinating! :)

[conuly]

You can't throw out a comment like that and then not tell me how you make your r!

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

LOL, okay, let me see if I can break it down. I'm hampered because I don't remember the descriptors for the parts or muscles of the mouth, nor the terms to describe the parts of phonemes, so this will be a sketchy and imprecise explanation, but here goes:

When I go to say road-race, the muscle under my jaw moves the inner edge of my lower lip toward the edge of my upper front teeth. The lip doesn't necessarily touch the teeth, but it does flatten and evert slightly as if it was going to, even when it doesn't. Most of the sound is made at the back of the throat, though, and shaped by the muscle at the base of the tongue.

It's that same muscle that makes the r- sounds in car-door. I do pronounce all my r-s, but I don't hit them very hard when they come at the end of a word. Even so, they're much more from the back of the mouth than from the front, which is probably why they don't get blended with my t-s, since those come from the tongue and the palate.

Hope that makes some kind of sense!