LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

  While making my bed this morning, and due to the strange workings of the brain, I started humming  a little poem I learnt in my early youth: A Flea and a Fly A flea and a fly in a flue Were inprisoned. What could they do? "Let us fly!" said the flea. "Let us flee!" said the fly. So they flew through a flaw in the flue. I have done some research on this, and it passes off as a tongue twister. It is not. It is a pun riddle. Flea vs. flee; flue vs. flew; fly noun vs. fly verb. It is a good example of the workings of puns in the English language. My dictionary defines "pun" (retruécano) as "the humorous use of a word or phrase to emphasize or suggest its different meanings or applications, or the use of words that are alike or nearly alike in sound but different in meaning; a play on words." 

Los trabalenguas o tongue twisters repiten un sonido una y otra vez para crear confusión y "trabar" -twist- la lengua. Son una buena práctica para dominar la parte mecánica de la fonética de un idioma. La lengua parece que se muestra reacia a hacer movimientos y colocarse en posiciones "extrañas" en el segundo idioma. Cada capítulo -sonido- de mi libro PHONÉTICA INGLESA PARA TORPES contiene un trabalenguas. Muchos son conocidos; otros son de mi invención, con más o menos acierto. Veamos algunos. Para practicar la /t/: Betty bought butter but the butter was bitter, so Betty bought better butter to make the bitter butter better. Don't trouble trouble, till trouble troubles you! Para practicar la /p/ tan diferente de la castellana: Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. Did Peter Piper pick a peck of pickled peppers? Para practicar los dos sonidos de la grafía /th/ Those bathing thinkers were breathing the other three thieves' air there.

Tongue twister (trabalenguas): is a sentence that is hard to articulate because it has a succession of similar consonant or vowel sounds: Un tigre, dos tigres, tres tigres. She sells seashells on the seashore.    In order to ease the mastery of sounds I have cooked up tongue-twisting drills that will pave the way to practice phonemes –a unit of a phonetic system, a single sound- in a simple and practical manner.   Language acquirement is thought of as a mental process where the intellect plays the dominant role, thus we forget that it is also a physical task: language involves –of course- sound, and human sound is made by airflow in the larynx, and articulated and modulated by the different parts of the mouth: lips, teeth, tongue, alveolar ridges, hard and soft palate and even the nose. In a nutshell: language is also a mechanical technique that involves using accurately parts of the human anatomy to produce the right sounds. It implies a physical skill , ...