For anyone who doesn't know it yet, there is this really fun site
http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to...tive-demo.html where you can enter any word or sentence and have native speakers of several languages pronounce it. It is actually a demo for a speech recognition software.
Unfortunately there's no Bulgarian choice, so I could not hear the тояга pronounced, though it sounds like a very useful word indeed!
I did listen to the Danish words though, and if the software works as it should, I am shocked and fascinated by "rødgrød med fløde" and whoever manages to pronounce it! Wow!
This made me remember an interesting study that I had watched in a documentary, and I managed to find a relevant article. Experiments have shown that as babies we can recognise all the little nuances in sound and differentiate between them. We lose however this ability very early on: As we are getting better and better in our native language's sounds, we start ignoring the rest.
Quote:
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At 6 months of age, babies notice when the sounds change most of the time, no matter what language the syllables are from. But over the next six months of life, the babies get even better at perceiving the changes in sounds from their "own" language, the one their parents speak -- yet they gradually lose the ability to recognize changes in sounds that don't exist in their native tongue.
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and
Quote:
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"They are citizens of the world at 6 months, and then by 12 months, they are these language-specific listeners," Kuhl said. "Even in the first year of life, before you get any sound out of them, language is being mapped by the brain."
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Have a read, it's really interesting stuff.
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/39928_learn22.shtml
So when two foreign words sound exactly the same to you, while a native speaker insists that they are
totally different, you now know why. This doesn't explain why some people manage to have very convincing accents in foreign languages later in life, while others never can, though. A (musical) friend suggested once to me that it has to do something with having a musical ear, but I'm not sure. I'm rubbish at music, myself, but probably better than average in accents.