{"id":238198,"date":"2010-01-27T11:49:40","date_gmt":"2010-01-27T16:49:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2078"},"modified":"2010-01-27T11:49:40","modified_gmt":"2010-01-27T16:49:40","slug":"noahs-arch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/238198","title":{"rendered":"Noah&#8217;s Arch?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today&#8217;s Non Sequitur:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/NoahsArch.gif\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"Click to embiggen\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/NoahsArch.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"475\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><span id=\"more-2078\"><\/span><br \/>\nAlas for the (otherwise clever) joke, this is not a very likely confusion for speakers of American English. We can estimate exactly how (un-) likely it is, other things equal, from this confusion matrix given in Anne Cutler et al., &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/lib.ioa.ac.cn\/ScienceDB\/JASA\/jasa2004\/pdfs\/vol_116\/iss_6\/3668_1.pdf\">Patterns of English phoneme confusions by native and non-native listeners<\/a>&#8220;, <em>Journal of the Acoustical Society of America<\/em> 116(6), 2004:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/FinalConsonantConfusion.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"Click to embiggen\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/FinalConsonantConfusion.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"475\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Even at 0 dB SNR, final American-English \/t\u0283\/  was heard as \/k\/ only 0.4% of the time by native speakers.<\/p>\n<p>(Dutch listeners in this experiment apparently never made that  particular error at all, because the relevant cell of the ir confusion matrix &#8212; look at the paper to find it &#8212; is blank.)<\/p>\n<p>Of course, the original message would presumably have been in proto-Afroasiatic, or Sumerian, or something, where by the laws of chance, the two words were probably not even as close as <em>ark<\/em> and <em>arch<\/em> are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today&#8217;s Non Sequitur: Alas for the (otherwise clever) joke, this is not a very likely confusion for speakers of American English. We can estimate exactly how (un-) likely it is, other things equal, from this confusion matrix given in Anne Cutler et al., &#8220;Patterns of English phoneme confusions by native and non-native listeners&#8220;, Journal of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4144,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-238198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4144"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}