8.2.1. Consonants

Those seeking to lead a spiritual life may naturally become inspired to live in peace and non violence. To learn spiritual practices to develop these values, one may turn to spiritual teachers, to different types of religion, or to different types of yoga. But beginning to cultivate spiritual awareness is not always as simple as it seems – especially in family relationships, in unhealthy relationships, or while dealing with difficult people. Daily interactions such as these may feel like the very definition of conflict! In the book “Science Of Speech”, Gnani Purush (embodiment of Self knowledge) Dada Bhagwan offers key understanding about non violent communication, along with conflict resolution skills and conflict management strategies. His spiritual teaching on how to resolve conflict - or to avoid it altogether - is offered in the context of common and everyday relationship challenges. Among the myriad of spiritual books available today, “Science Of Speech” is a unique resource. Whether wondering how to become more spiritual, or simply how to deal with negative people and difficult people, this book will prove invaluable.

The study of grammatical variation in language mixing has been at the core of research into bilingual language practices. Although various motivations have been proposed in the literature to account for possible mixing patterns, some of them are either controversial, or remain untested. Little is still known about whether and how frequency of use of linguistic elements can contribute to the patterning of bilingual talk. This book is the first to systematically explore the factor usage frequency in a corpus of bilingual speech. The two aims are (i) to describe and analyze the variation in mixing patterns in the speech of Russia German adolescents and young adults in Germany, and (ii) to propose and test usage-based explanations of variation in mixing patterns in three morphosyntactic contexts: the adjective-modified noun phrase, the prepositional phrase, and the plural marking of German noun insertions in bilingual sentences. In these contexts, German noun insertions combine with either Russian or German words and grammatical markers, thus yielding mixed bilingual and German monolingual constituents in otherwise Russian sentences, the latter also labelled as embedded-language islands. The results suggest that the frequency with which words are used together mediates the distribution of mixing patterns in each of the examined contexts. The differing impacts of co-occurrence frequency are attributed to the distributional and semantic specifics of the analyzed morphosyntactic configurations. Lexical frequency has been found to be another important determinant in this variation. Other factors include recency, or lexical priming, in discourse in the case of prepositional phrases, and phonological and structural similarities and differences in the inflectional systems of the contact languages in the case of plural marking.

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2019 in the subject Speech Science / Linguistics, grade: 2,7, University of Vechta, language: English, abstract: The linguistic differences between German and English are going to be researched and compared, in order to light upon the reasons for mispronunciations and difficulties for German speakers of English. Learning a language or a skill in general, naturally needs practice and commitment to be able to master it. However, this text is going to leave this aspect aside and will concentrate on differences which emerge from the languages themselves. German and English are two different languages with the same Latin alphabet and different grammar for the naked eye, but beneath the surface are further differences and similarities which can be described in order to understand why German speakers of English seem to produce the same mistakes when no practice for correct pronunciation is given. The importance of English has increased over the past years and is one of the most spoken and important languages. It is needed in business relations, to read manuals, can be used in almost all foreign countries for communication and is generally important for every working citizen in terms of a business language, as former European Commissioner Günther Oettinger stated in his interview with German broadcast channel SWR in 2005. In 2010 a speech of Oettinger was published, which was held in the Columbia University of Berlin and showed, after his contribution in the broadcast, that his English proficiency was not appropriate when considering the circumstances. Especially in terms of politics, an individual wants to be taken seriously and act superior in all tasks given to comply with the role of a representative politician. After Oettinger held his speech, it was naturally connected to what was originally said by him, with the obvious connotation that he failed to meet his own expectations in English acquisition by far, although it was of utmost importance. The English language however can be difficult for foreign speakers. Although being of the same Germanic origin as German, many foreign speakers experience a hard time when trying to achieve native-like pronunciation. Words such as squirrel, all words with a 'th-' and minimal pairs (e.g. hat and had) are often difficult to pronounce and distinguish for foreign learners, due to phonetic and phonemic differences, which cannot easily be translated into the German system due to their non-existence.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1864. Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Bretain. Second series.