EYE-rock? EE-rock? ...
- Thread starter Baron Max
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Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Hmm. Must be my old Chicago accent, like app-ricot and rooff. I notice most Americans don't pronounce a closed AI in "right" and an open AI in "ride" like my family, either.
There is a consistency. We pronounce accented long U as OO only after the dentals: tube, duty, sue, nuclear. After the other consonant series, it's YOO: puny, future, muse, cube. After the dentals when unaccented, we retained the YOO, but that caused affricative palatalization of the consonant: educate (joo), usual (zhoo), virtue (choo), annual (well we're stuck with nyoo on that one but we do say it that way). We don't say edyoocate and virtyoo the way you do.
Palatalization is a powerful force in phonetic evolution. Indeed, it's the reason that half of the Indo-European languages are called the "Satem" branch: the K in kmtom for "hundred" became S in all of them, e.g. Sanskrit satem and Russian sto. Yet... look what's happened to that K in the "Kentum" branch. The K in Latin centum itself has palatialized into S in French and Portuguese, CH in Italian and Romanian, TH in Spanish. It's still K in Greek hekaton, but Grimm's Law turned it into H in proto-Germanic, e.g. English hundred. Does anyone here speak Gaelic?
Palatalization is rampant in the Slavic languages; Russian and Croatian have whole series of extra letters in their alphabet to accommodate it. Czech kde, "where," is Russian gdie and even more palatalized in Polish gdzie.
We can see the equally rampant palatalization in Mandarin alongside familiar Cantonese names: Bei Jing for Be King and Xiang Geng for Hong Gong. We can also see the typical British mangling of a foreign language's sounds in your Wade-Giles transliteration system, e.g. Peking and Hong Kong.
We also see it in Japanese, where the spots in the syllabaries for TI, DI, SI and ZI are occupied by CHI, JI, SHI and ZHI.
That's just back-formation from spelling, a phenomenon of the age of literacy: a population showing off their ability to read. Like the C in "arctic," which was already silent when we got the word from the French, and the T in "often," which is a lexicographer's error.
I hear the same thing from Spanish language radio announcers: only people who can read Spanish pronounce the C in octavo or the P in optimo. Those sounds vanished around the same time they did in Italian, but the Italians normalized their spelling. Mexican-Americans who have American education and English phonetics in their heads are even starting to differentiate between Spanish V and B, which is completely bogus.
More back-formation. If it's fyoo-TILL-ity then it must be FYOO-till, so it must also be MISS-ill. That trend has not completed, we still say textile and percentile.
How do you say it? sha-SEE? You guys do treat French better than any other foreign language, I guess you're still kissing up to the occupying forces.
Oh come on. That's one illiterate redneck! He can't say three words without getting one of them wrong. I think everyone else in America now pronounces "nuclear" correctly to avoid sounding like Bush. At least he likes your music: He thought the punch line to "Fool me once, shame on you" was "Won't get fooled again."
We don't pronounce it as D. We pronounce both intervocalic T and D as a flapped R, the way some of you say "very." I saw a TV show about the training of telephone help desk people in India to speak American English instead of the British English they're all taught. It seemed to me that the flapped T and D was one of the hardest things for them. I guess R is not flapped in the Indic languages?
Maybe if I was english....
Say "petal" out loud....then say "pedal". Tell me they don't sound the same in your american accent.
You can say anything you want, but the people who get to tell you how to speak english will always be the english. If you don't like it, make up your own language....or is that what you guys are already doing, at a very, very slow pace? Maybe it's a case of, well, shit, we stole everyone's place names and pronounce our own ones wrong anyway (new orleans, detroit, st. louis to name a few) so let's steal someone's language and fuck that up too?
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
I keep forgetting you're not really English or German.
Yes, that's my point, they are the same sound. But that sound is not a D. I can't input the IPA but it's a flapped R as in most non-Germanic European languages. Listen to a Spaniard say "caro" and then listen to an American say "cotto" (the salami, but it's really hard to find two matching words, sorry). They sound the same. Take it from those American dialect trainers in Bangalore, this is not a T or a D and it's not easy for speakers of British English to emulate. Apparently not even easy to hear accurately but get a native speaker of Italian, Spanish, Romanian or a Slavic language to say his R and you'll start to identify the sound. Again, does anybody know how they pronounce R in Gaelic? Schleeb, you live in Scotland where everybody speaks it, right?
Actually some of our most authoritative dictionaries present themselves as "dictionaries of the American language."
The people who established English in America did not steal it from you: they were Englishmen and women! The differences between our dialects are relatively minor as dialects go. Many linguists call the "Italian" of Sicily a distinct language. The Arabic of Egypt and the Arabic of Iraq create quite a few misunderstandings. The Mandarin of Bei Jing and the Mandarin of Si Chuan come close to failing the intercomprehensibility test.
We may mangle your language but we all still love England. (Sorry about Scotland, we just love your whiskey.) King Arthur, Robin Hood, and Shakespeare's plays are our myths too. We'll be there for you the next time the Germans get uppity because this world would not be the same without England, quaint pronunciation and all.
God save the Queen.
LOL! Whiskey is Irish! I think you meant Whisky
Just remember....england, Scotland, two different countries.
No one speaks Gaelic here because of some Polish upstart and a few silly highlanders causing trouble. The only people that speak it now live on little islands around Scotland, but we still have to endure an entire night on TV every week dedicated to Gaelic programming
Just remember....england, Scotland, two different countries.
Fraggle Rocker said:
No one speaks Gaelic here because of some Polish upstart and a few silly highlanders causing trouble. The only people that speak it now live on little islands around Scotland, but we still have to endure an entire night on TV every week dedicated to Gaelic programming
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Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Really? I don't drink the stuff, I'm a Southern Comfort man. You're saying that if I look closely at the label on a bottle of Cutty Sark it will say "Scotch Whisky"?
It's hard to keep that straight since it is only one united "kingdom."
Sorry, we Americans know nothing of British history north of that border except "MacBeth" and "Brigadoon." "Highlander" was a fabulous TV show starring Adrian Paul and who is the Polish upstart?
I should think that would be fun for somebody who hangs out on the Linguistics forum.
I enjoy listening to foreign languages although it would be nice to know what they are sometimes. Anyway check how they pronounce their R. I have this perhaps apocryphal memory of Scotsmen furiously trrrrilling your R like Spaniards, especially when you're trying to make a pointThe stuff we make here in Scotland says "Whisky".
Bonny Prince Charlie. Led the Jacobite rebellion in 1745.
Yeah, my parents do that. They also do some weird things like add an extra syllable into words like "girl" and "world" so you get "gerrrrrul" and "wurrrrruld". Annoys the hell out of me.
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John Connellan
Valued Senior Member
it is obviously an effect of Gaelic as in the Irish accent, people also add vowels but more like:
Gerril and Worild.
Also, I believe that traditional Gaelic speakers roll their tongues for the 'r' sound.
Gerril and Worild.
Also, I believe that traditional Gaelic speakers roll their tongues for the 'r' sound.
BTW we pronounce "Gaelic" differently in Scotland too. Instead of "gay lick" (lol) we say "gah-lick", like garlic without the "r". This refers to the Scottish version of Gaelic which is different from the Irish version.
Just a little fact for you stinking foreigners.
Just a little fact for you stinking foreigners.
whats that all about?
That's rich considering our English is closer to Shakespeare's than that of the British Isles.
Are you saying we shouldn't pronounce our Rs except in special cases (compare "your ball" and "your apple"), and should skip entire syllables (compare American and British versions of "literally")?
Someone tell me why Americans cant spell?
Mom
Color
Thats not English.
Mom
Color
Thats not English.
As far as I am aware, there is a degree of permissibility in one's choice of pronounciation, but the closest to native would be:
Ee-rock.
When in doubt, use the Romantic i.
Ee-rock.
When in doubt, use the Romantic i.
I don't pronounce "mom" with an "uh" sound. I say "ah". Maahhhm. It's a shortening of "mama". It rhymes with "palm" for me. In IPA, it's [mɑm]. But according to Wikipedia, Australian English doesn't have [ɑ], except as the first vowel in the diphthong [ɑe] in such words as "rice" and "bite". But I'm sure you know how we talk.
And "colour" looks like kuh-LOOR to me, like it would be if read as a French word.
Softly trilling your R is also romantic. It woos the ladies quite nicely.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
We do the same thing, with different syllables in different words. Choc'late, int'rest. We say lab'ratory instead of laborat'ry.
The unaccented schwa disappears, that's a powerful force in phonetic change. German Wie geht's? Russian molodoj, gorod vs. Czech mlady, hrad.
Or how about just the entire French dictionary?
That's rich considering our English is closer to Shakespeare's than that of the British Isles.
Are you saying we shouldn't pronounce our Rs except in special cases (compare "your ball" and "your apple"), and should skip entire syllables (compare American and British versions of "literally")?
No, I'm just saying if anyone is "right" it's the english and any foreigner who claims their version is "more correct" than the "official" version of english (naturally the one spoken by the english) is a fucking idiot. The language is called "english". Don't even think about mentioning "american english".
"Skipping syllables" (I don't see how skipping the t shortens the syllables in the word....still 4) by contracting the word to "li'erally" is less of a crime against the language than changing a t to a d to make "liderally" (no matter what Fraggle Rocker said about all this flapped r stuff, it's still fundamentally changing the word) because think about it....couldn't, shouldn't, wouldn't does the same thing. It's just a contraction.
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It's just me being facetious.
I hope you realize that there's no "right" English, both from a linguistic standpoint and from an official one. Linguistically, British English and American English, as well as all the other Englishes, are just dialects of one English language. None can claim they speak the true English language, even the English, especially considering that the English language is not regulated by any language authority in the way other languages are. There is no English equivalent to the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española.
Also, are we not Englishmen too? Remember, they did help colonize this part of the world.
G. F. Schleebenhorst said:
Too late.
G. F. Schleebenhorst said:
:bugeye:
Do you not know the English you claim is superior? If you did, you'd know I was talking about "LITCH-ruh-lee". Not this mutilated "LIH-'er-uh-lee" you're talking about.
I enjoy the English accent, but I do wish English actors and actresses would pay more attention to the American accent when portraying Americans. I was watching this one show on BBC America and the actor playing a Texan was doing a fine job. He was a stereotypical wealthy landowner and had the swagger down pat. The only thing that threw the image off was his pronunciation of the word 'ceremony'. He pronounced it "SIR-munee" where just about any American would have said "SAIR-uh-moh-nee".
I really don't have a problem with accents. I grew up around people from various nations, and while working at a tourist spot, the Winchester Mystery House, was tapped to help a couple of foreign travellers who were wanting to know how to get to the "hoos wit da mommies". I wasn't sure what country they were from, but it took only a few seconds for me to figure out they were asking for the "house with the mummies", better known to us as the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum.
I have but one question for those who are fluent in non-English languages; why do they put genders on inaminate objects? I'm curious what the origins of that are.
(PS: I prounce it uh-RAK and uh-RAN. Mother-in-law calls China "Chiner" but pronounces Russia, Dakota, and other -a names without the "er" sound. I have no idea why China is singled out in her dialect. She's from upstate New York, which she sometimes calls "New York", sometimes "New Yowuk", but has never called it "New Yahk". I'm from California, which, according to an old friend from Virginia, is the only place he's heard people prounce words without an accent. ???)
I really don't have a problem with accents. I grew up around people from various nations, and while working at a tourist spot, the Winchester Mystery House, was tapped to help a couple of foreign travellers who were wanting to know how to get to the "hoos wit da mommies". I wasn't sure what country they were from, but it took only a few seconds for me to figure out they were asking for the "house with the mummies", better known to us as the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum.
I have but one question for those who are fluent in non-English languages; why do they put genders on inaminate objects? I'm curious what the origins of that are.
(PS: I prounce it uh-RAK and uh-RAN. Mother-in-law calls China "Chiner" but pronounces Russia, Dakota, and other -a names without the "er" sound. I have no idea why China is singled out in her dialect. She's from upstate New York, which she sometimes calls "New York", sometimes "New Yowuk", but has never called it "New Yahk". I'm from California, which, according to an old friend from Virginia, is the only place he's heard people prounce words without an accent. ???)