Country Roads, L's and R's

H/T American Digest

As Gerard Van Der Luen opines at his site, "kooky, korney, . . . and kompletely charming." Agreed. The entire Far East is a pretty amazing place, with all the very worst and best of humanity. And also, it is a place with very different linguistics.

It took me a few years to get to where I could speak the Korean language with any sort of fluency. Koreans and Japanese have a much harder time with English, I think, because some of the sounds are, well, so foreign. In Korean, they have a letter that is a combination of R and L. To pronounce it properly, you have to form your mouth to make an "R" sound and then slur to make an "L" sound. It is very similar to Japanese which, though it uses a character syllabary rather than an alphabet, uses the same R and L combination in it's speech. For Koreans and Japanese, it is very difficult to make a distinct "R" sound or a distinct "L" sound. That's one of the reasons Americans fighting in the Pacific sector in WWII would always use passwords with "R's" and "L's" in them.

At any rate, it's one of the reason Japanese and Korean children, making an effort to speak English words, sound so cute, as in the video above. On a related note, for years, my son, who spent his early childhood in Korea thought that his name, Scotty, was pronounced Su-Kotty.

At any rate, here is another very cute video from the orient - this one from Korea of a little girl who will one day be a true trumpet prodigy.



No group of people do cute like the Koreans and Japanese. I wish I could find a video of Dana Carvey's skit where he is overcome by cuteness . . . it would be appropriate here.

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