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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,773
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,773 |
Well, I must nominate my own surname for the most-egregious-mispronounciation-by-a-single-person award. Here's the story:
I have a fairly simple surname, two syllables, spelled like it is pronounced. Except, it has a "z" in it; which seems to send people into catatonia.
My mother and father attended a high school together, and my father's best friend and my mother's best friend married. My parents were their wedding attendents, and vice versa. We grew up calling my parents' friends "aunt" and "uncle," and referred to their children as cousins. I was their older daughter's maid of honor. Their younger daughter married a cousin of mine, and now has the same surname. Despite all this -- friendship nearing 60 years' duration, close ties, a daughter and grandchildren with the surname, my "aunt" still mispronounces my surname!!!!!
How bad is that?
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Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,439
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,439 |
Bean noted : Some names just don't follow the innate "patterns" which English-speaking people have grown up with. A gentleman named Kane (pr. Cane in English) was visiting Hawaii (part of the USA last time I looked)  and had need for a Doctor for a bad sunburn. He sat in a waiting room for about an hour and a half as one person after another was called. Finally he asked why he had not been called only to discover he had been called four times. The problem? The nurse had used the Hawaiian pronunciation for Kane : KA-nay.  Live and learn. wow
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Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 1,289
veteran
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OP
veteran
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 1,289 |
Pronunciation tendencies
I tend to think there is more to this problem than tendencies. It has been shown often that children up to a certain age are capable of learning to speak another language with native fluency and without any accent. But at some point, usually the teens, if they learn a new language they may learn to understand and write with native fluency, but will always speak it with some degree of an accent. The older you are when you learn a language, the heavier your accent will be. Thus, it would seem that our vocal apparatus is conditioned from birth to our native tongue and unless a new language is learned early, it will not adapt to another. A case in point is French speakers. The most obvious trait of someone speaking English with a French accent is the inability to pronounce the "th" sound, which does not exist in French; or the inability of English speakers to pronounce the French 'u' or German 'ü' which does not exist in English.
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 87
journeyman
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journeyman
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 87 |
Interesting note re Bobyoungbalt's post up there -
I am bilingual in English and German and I have found that the ability to speak German without an accent has aided me in pronouncing (How _does_ one spell that word emoticon!) words in other languages. To wit, my French still sounds American but the accent is softened some by my ability to pronouce "a" and "u" and even "r." Likewise, there are a few really challenging, for English-speakers, Persian words involving the sound "kh" and the guttural "gh." The Persian word for "frog" is my favorite - ghulbahreh (phonetically spelled!). I impressed my Iranian friends to no end when they discovered I could say that correctly!
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Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 544
addict
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addict
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 544 |
I have found that the ability to speak German without an accent has aided me in pronouncing (How _does_ one spell that word emoticon!) words in other languages.
I've had similar experiences with multiple languages. I am not a native Spanish speaker, but have studied it for many years and lived in a number of hispanophone countries. After spending some time while in college studying in Spain, I then went on to study in Italy (ah, I miss those days...). Throughout my time in Italy, I spoke Italian, sounded like a Spaniard due to my accent, and (with long blond hair at the time) looked more like a German. Nobody could figure me out, which was great fun.
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,773
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,773 |
The capacity of the brain to absorb new languages is extraordinary in the early developmental years, but the language center of the brain stabilizes at a certain age in childhood, making learning a new language much more difficult, including the pronunciation aspects. I'm forgetting the age at which this happens, but I'm pretty sure that it is before age 13 -- a perfect reason to teach foreign languages in the early grades, and not to wait until high school like most US schools do! Anyway, while looking in one of my books for the developmental capacity for languages, I stumbled on this interesting fact: we all know that language is primarily processed in the language center of the brain, don't we? Well, people who lived in Japan at an early age, whether genetically Japanese or not, process isolated vowel sounds predominately in the left hemisphere, while all others do so predominately in the right hemisphere. Significantly, in English and many other languages, it is impossible to compose a sentence without consonants, but it can be done in Japanese. The book, The Brain, Restak (Bantam Books, 1984) speculates why there are such differences between the philosophies of Japanese and western culture: "If Dr. Tsunoda's research is correct, the left hemisphere in the Japanese brain is concerned with things that are as important as logic is to a Westerner: intuition, indirection, and the creative use of space and sound. The sensitivity to these multiple components of human communication facilitates judgment about people and events that would be impossible to a person who relies on 'logic' alone.
Central to Dr. Tsuanoda's thesis is the importance of language as a determinant of brain organization, patterns of thinking, and ultimately culture. While Westerners allocate both their language and logical functions to the left hemisphere, with the nonverbal aspect of communication to the right hemisphere, the Japanese brain, in contrast, processes sounds and experiences relevant to emotion in the left hemisphere. The stimulus for the relegation to one hemisphere or the other, according to Dr. Tsunoda, is none other than language itself.
'I believe that the mother tongue differenciates the way in which people receive, process, feel, and understand sounds in the external environment,' says Dr. Tsunoda. 'The mother tongue is closely related to the development of the emotional mechanism in the brain. I conjecture that the mother tongue acquired in childhood is closely linked with the formation of the unique culture and mentality of each ethnic group.'"BTW, the only language other than English I've ever studied was Spanish, and when traveling in Germany, everyone mistook me for Italian. I think because I was the only one who could properly pronounce "pizza diabolo." 
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Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400 |
More about pronounciation-- the good doctors name-- Dr. Tsunoda's- has the TS-- which to people who haven't learned it in childhood -- sounds just like S-- but Suyuki and Tsuyuki in Japanese are as different as Brined and Blind-- words my Japanese brother- in -law "hears"(an pronounces) the same.--as brined
(or brineds-- as in "we got some venitain Brineds for the window.")-- but most adult learner of English (or Japanese) have trouble with one (or the other!)
Just as i can't say Tsuyuki right-- he has trouble with Blind/brined. This ability to hear certain sound used in a language disapears young-- before the age of five-- So my bi-lingual neice and nephew can both say their name, and say blinds! (or say brine-- when speaking about the taste of sea water)
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Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146 |
A friend of mine was flying to New Zealand from Narita airport in Tokyo a couple of years ago. At the check-in counter the attendant gave him his boarding pass and his baggage chits and brightly invited him to "Have a nice fright!"
He wondered if her apparent mispronunciation was simple foresight a little later when the plane lost an engine half an hour out of Tokyo!
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 328
enthusiast
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enthusiast
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 328 |
On this morning's news broadcast, the anchor repeatedly pronounced the word "sentenced" (in the criminal sense) as something like "sed-inced" or "sen-inced." Also, I often hear people pronounce "appreciate" as "apprishiate." Just thought of another one-- I know some people who say "supposably" when they mean "supposedly." 
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Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 3,409
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 3,409 |
, I often hear people pronounce "appreciate" as "apprishiate." If you prefer "appreeseeate", then, for your own sake, don't come here! "Apprishiate" is more or less standard in NZ, get the pitcha?
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