Bouncing-cats is fun, boots-cats is faster and funner.

So for the speech therapy, IIUC, this becomes an exercise to internalize what voicing actually means, by devoicing a whole phrase?

That's pretty much right on the linguistics. Those are pairs of voiced and voiceless stops with the same place of articulation. In English voiceless stops in initial position are also heavily aspirated, so just removing the voicing of voiced stops doesn't make them completely identical, but it's pretty close.

No, this was just an interesting aside.

They spend a lot of time really understanding tongue placement, and relaxing certain jaw muscles. Then there's daily homework which is basically "say this list of words every day, as many times as you can in two minutes." My take is that your smart brain really has no idea how to talk, and in order to change your speech, it's an excruciating process of teaching your smart brain, and then spending a hell of a lot of practice getting your smart brain to teach your dumb brain to do it automatically.

We had a faculty workshop yesterday on trauma-informed pedagogy. The guy did a fantastic job, given that he only had two hours. What he's trying to get us to do is think about our style of teaching the way Ace's speech therapist is trying to Ace to think about their speech. It struck me as incredibly futile. If you're not actually going to commit the kind of ongoing time that speech therapy requires, changing any sort of automatic behavior is not going to be very successful.

I like "smart brain" and "dumb brain." It feels descriptive of my own ongoing education, and I suspect a lot of what goes wrong with old people is that they give up on trying to teach their dumb brain anything. One's incapacities and prejudices become unchangeable facts of one's nature.

Right now I am trying to teach my dumb brain how to dribble and shoot a basketball left-handed. It isn't going very well, but I think there's value in the effort.

I went to speech therapy in first grade. It was always a joint session with me and a girl from my class. Apparently, the rest of the class spoke perfectly. We walked three blocks on public sidewalks to the therapist's office. He was shared with another school and his office there. He couldn't walk to us because of polio, I think. He required two of those crutches with the forearm holders even for short distances.

I guess my point is that I remember quite a lot, but I can't remember what the content of the actual therapy was. Maybe I still talk poorly? My fellow student now runs a major social service program for Kristi Noem. I don't know if that's evidence her problem was fixed or not.

It's really common for people to tell Ace that they sound English when they talk. A lot of kids at their school say it, and random adults have told me that they like their accent. (It drives Ace crazy.)

I mentioned this to the speech therapist, who said that that it's due to clenching the jaw on certain vowels (I forget the details, but she gave an example of what kids with speech impediments do that sounds British to the rest of us non-Brits, and it was spot on). I think this is very funny that Brits sound like Americans with speech impediments, to Americans at least.

I've mentioned that to them before and the British always seem offended.

Have you tried explaining that they need to unclench their jaw?

I don't think so, but I remember my English roommate being livid that he had to prove he spoke comprehensible English, to the standards of an Ohioan, before he could become a teaching assistant.

Look, if English was good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for that foreign bloke.

Funnily enough, he now teaches in Wales and is either using Google translate or learning Walesian.

I mentioned this to the speech therapist, who said that that it's due to clenching the jaw on certain vowels

Interesting! Vowels are a lot harder to characterize/categorize than consonants, because the vowel space is continuous whereas the consonant space is essentially discrete. There's only so many ways you can stop or constrict the airflow in the mouth to create a consonant, but with vowels you have the full range of motion of the tongue and jaw to deal with and languages divide it up all sorts of ways.

12: Isn't it called wale song?

Arabic doesn't have a "p". Some of my Lebanese friends (who seem to be born speaking three language fluently) find no end in humor in poking fun at Egyptians for not being able to say it, "I need to find a barking space" and the like.

It's definitely not "Arapic".

It's "aspic". It's like Jello, but very wrong.

It really is the full range of motion, btw. Some West African languages use the position of the back of the tongue as a contrastive feature in vowels. "Advanced tongue root" is the technical term linguists use for this, usually indicated with a dot under the vowel. You see this in Nigerian names a lot.

15: This is a recurring theme in the work of Israeli Arab writer, Sayed Kashua (now teaching Hebrew in St. Louis). He is always trying to "pass" as Jewish, but is scared his inability to say "p" will expose him.

Is 'urine' too formal?

He's trying to urinate as Jewish?

Because that's a specific tell.

All involved all supposed to be circumcised regardless.

Good boint.

Thanks. I try my best.

g's and k's are very similar

"Log unfogged" might be a fun beatboxing phrase to try.

1: If you're not voicing it, you might as well say "butts cats", which is even funnier.

I don't know that retraining my voice is literally the hardest thing I've ever done, but it's got to be up there. A lot of what they have you work on isn't pitch so much as a series of hissing and humming exercises designed to help you bring your vocal placement forward, "as if it's falling out the front of your mouth," to approximate the resonance of someone whose larynx didn't drop in puberty. After a few sessions with a speech therapist I could do it okay while concentrating, but it takes forever to get the dumb brain to do it routinely, because you have to develop an ear for when it's not working and there are all these inhibitions that come up in different social circumstances, or if you're stressed or flustered or whatever, and then a whole distinct set of problems around singing.

There was a funny moment with the family where we were watching a video on my phone from a couple years back, and suddenly my old voice boomed out from behind the camera and we all instantly shrieked because there was this UNEXPECTED MAN in the house. So obviously something's changed.

Would it help to try to sound British?