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OCR
HUNGARIAN-ENGLISH LINGUISTIC CONTRASTS. A PRACTICAL APPROACH dark /l/ - are unknown in Hungarian. Velar /n/ has a different phonemic status: in English it is a phoneme, in Hungarian it is an allophone of the phoneme /n/. Several Hungarian consonants (such as the consonants denoted by the letters c, gy, ny and ty) do not exist in English. They are matched by phoneme combinations in words like rats, stats, that’s, due, duty, duke, new, nude, nuke, tube, tune, Tudor, but phonetically these combinations sound different, and they do not constitute phonemes in their own right (cf. Hungarian dér and gyér, in and iny). Most importantly, geminate consonants do not exist in English. In this case we have a convergent phenomenon, which, according to the hierarchies of difficulty developed by CL, is not supposed to cause significant difficulty. In this case, however, it is spelling that complicates the picture: since double consonant letters are used in English (pronounced as single consonants), Hungarian learners may pronounce them as geminate consonants. This is spelling interference, not phonological, and is relatively easily overcome by learners, except in words of Latin origin that exist both in English and Hungarian, and which Hungarians tend to pronounce with geminate consonants as in their native language: illegal, irregular, immature, etc. 3.3.1 Phonetic differences There are phonetic differences in the articulation of some consonants: /d/ in English is alveolar, in Hungarian dental; the affricates /tf, d3/ are fricatives in Hungarian, while in English combinations of stop + fricative (perceived by Hungarians as geminate). Aspiration in the pronunciation of the voiceless obstruents /p, t, k/, as mentioned above, is a phonetic feature not paralleled in Hungarian. 3.3.2 Distribution The distribution of some consonants also shows differences: English /3/ does not occur in initial position; clear /l/ is in complementary distribution with dark /t/; /r/ in British English occurs only in prevocalic position and is dropped in postvocalic and final position. Permitted consonant sequences are also different: consonant sequences such as spl- or -mplz (examples), or -ks@s (sixths) do not occur in Hungarian, while final /ng/ and /mb/ do not occur in English (ring, comb). 3.3.3 Phonological processes The phonological processes affecting consonants also show considerable differences. Assimilation in Hungarian is regressive (i.e., a following consonant has 42 ¢
