Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlearn

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by Znex »

Vijay wrote:
Znex wrote:I never learnt the Spanish numbers, but I know the Italian numbers from childhood (and later, the German numbers): uno, due, tre, quattro, cinque, se, sette, otto, nove, dieci.
Isn't it sei?
I wasn't sure, but you're right.
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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by Nortaneous »

Daemon would mostly be known from Unix nowadays -- how do sysadmins pronounce it? I don't think I've ever heard it not homophonous with demon.
linguoboy wrote:
alynnidalar wrote:Interesting. I would say that Americans are significantly more likely to have familiarity with Spanish than French, actually--who doesn't know greetings/how to count to ten in Spanish? Spanish speakers so vastly outnumber French speakers in the US, too.
Speakers don't even have to know that /ʃ/ for <ch> or /ʒ/ for <j> originates with French to apply this as a hypercorrection. Spanish may be more familiar, but it still has less prestige.

Still, there are signs of a shift afoot. I was at a fancy restaurant recently which had mujadarra (a Middle-Eastern dish) on the menu. The server kept pronouncing the <j> as /h/ and even corrected me for using /ʤ/. I just laughed and said, "It's not Spanish".
A lot of people have /ʒ/ for <j> in 'Beijing' and 'Azerbaijan'.
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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by linguoboy »

Vijay wrote:Do you mean it rhymes with delicious for you?
That's exactly what I'm saying. So perhaps this represents another source of analogy (since salacious is not a word I use often--and I've even caught myself saying that with tonic /ɪ/ before).
Nortaneous wrote:A lot of people have /ʒ/ for <j> in 'Beijing' and 'Azerbaijan'.
In the USA, at least, I would go so far as to say hyperforeign Bei[ʒ]ing is the majority pronunciation. Probably Ta[ʒ] Mahal as well. And last night I even heard a mutual friend call our friend Elijah "Eli[ʒ]ah".

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by Travis B. »

linguoboy wrote:
Nortaneous wrote:A lot of people have /ʒ/ for <j> in 'Beijing' and 'Azerbaijan'.
In the USA, at least, I would go so far as to say hyperforeign Bei[ʒ]ing is the majority pronunciation. Probably Ta[ʒ] Mahal as well. And last night I even heard a mutual friend call our friend Elijah "Eli[ʒ]ah".
These are the pronunciations of Beijing and Taj Mahal that I am used to; I try to not use hyperforeign pronunciations thereof, but I have to do so consciously. And even though I do not actually recall hearing or saying Elijah, for some reason the default pronunciation that comes to mind is the hyperforeign one.
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by linguoboy »

Travis B. wrote:And even though I do not actually recall hearing or saying Elijah, for some reason the default pronunciation that comes to mind is the hyperforeign one.
I wonder if it has something to do with position. I've having a harder time coming up with examples of deaffrication in postconsonantal or initial position. (I've heard giardiniera with [ʒ], although less consistently than the other words mentioned.)

I grew up calling the cheese parme[ʒ]an and was as mystified by the spelling as I was with margarine. I wonder how much of this is hyperforeignism and how much might be contamination from Standard Italian parmigiano, which is known to many speakers from Parmigiano-Reggiano and "veal/chicken/eggplant parmigiana". (I think we can safely eliminate the possibility of this representing a popular survival of an Italian dialect term since (a) the equivalent of Standard Italian parmigano in the eponymous dialect is pramzàn and (b) most US dialect speakers originate in the Mezzogiorno where I would also expect [z] rather than [ʒ] (cf. Neap. pasta e fasul' for SI pasta e fagioli)).

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by Zaarin »

I'm used to /ʤ/ in Azerbaijan and Elijah and /ʒ/ in Beijing (almost universally in America, as linguoboy said), with Taj Mahal equally likely to be either in my experience (though hearing /ʒ/ in any of them wouldn't really surprise me). I have /ʤ/ in all of them, which is natural in Azerbaijan, Elijah, and Taj Mahal, and deliberately cultivated in Beijing.
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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by Vijay »

My sister-in-law's from here in Austin, but her parents are from two towns in Uttar Pradesh located close to Delhi (and to each other). IIRC her dad is from Muzaffarnagar, and her mom is Ghaziabad, but her mom's family is better off than her dad's. Apparently, she pronounces Ghaziabad with a [z] but Muzaffarnagar with a [d͡ʒ] because she didn't realize that the latter actually has a z in it (I think it's possible that each parent only talked about their own hometown, not the other parent's). When I first met her and asked her where her parents were from, she said, "[mʊˈd͡ʒɑfnɑgɹ̩]?"

She also says [ˈsaɽʱi] for sari and [ˈsənskrɪt̪] for Sanskrit; in fact, she thought it was hilarious that I pronounce it [ˈsænskɹɪt̚] because she'd never heard any other pronunciation before other than her own and "it's obviously [ˈsənskrɪt̪]!" I think she also says [t̪ad͡ʒ mɛ̤l] for Taj Mahal.
linguoboy wrote:
Vijay wrote:Do you mean it rhymes with delicious for you?
That's exactly what I'm saying. So perhaps this represents another source of analogy (since salacious is not a word I use often--and I've even caught myself saying that with tonic /ɪ/ before).
"Fallaciously but deliciously salacious!"
Nortaneous wrote:A lot of people have /ʒ/ for <j> in 'Beijing' and 'Azerbaijan'.
In the USA, at least, I would go so far as to say hyperforeign Bei[ʒ]ing is the majority pronunciation. Probably Ta[ʒ] Mahal as well.
I think I heard or read somewhere that this may have started to change a few decades ago or something.
I grew up calling the cheese parme[ʒ]an
Wait, you mean there are people who actually call it parme[d͡ʒ]an?

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by Soap »

I think the alternative pronunciation of parmesan is with a /z/... Nor necessarily borrowed from any language, just a spelling pronunciation I guess.
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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by linguoboy »

Vijay wrote:Wait, you mean there are people who actually call it parme[d͡ʒ]an?
I've never heard that pronunciation. As Soap says, the most common alternative is with [z]. (Apparently this is the usual pronunciation in the UK.) I don't think it constitutes a "spelling pronunciation" unless it can be shown that the [ʒ] pronunciation was historically normative.

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by linguoboy »

Last night, a friend repeatedly pronounced Thames [θeɪ̭mz] until another friend couldn't take it any more and corrected him. Even after that, he changed to [tʰæmz], presumably under the influence of the spelling.

(Before anyone asks: He's from Indiana, not the Northeast, so he probably isn't being influenced by the local pronunciation of the Thames River in Connecticut.)

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by Vijay »

I used to pronounce Thames [θeɪ̭mz], too.

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by linguoboy »

Vijay wrote:I used to pronounce Thames [θeɪ̭mz], too.
Maybe I did when I was really young, but I grew up watching UK television on PBS so I was exposed to this pronunciation early.

Now that I mention it, though, it's bringing up vague memories of [tʰeɪ̭mz]. So maybe I went through a stage of knowing the <h> was only for show but not realising the vowel was short.

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by Vijay »

linguoboy wrote:
Vijay wrote:I used to pronounce Thames [θeɪ̭mz], too.
Maybe I did when I was really young, but I grew up watching UK television on PBS so I was exposed to this pronunciation early.
I did, too, but probably much, much less than you (only on Saturday nights, because it apparently wasn't available on the local version of PBS at other times), so I never heard it until my brother told me and I was like "what?!?"

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by linguoboy »

Vijay wrote:I did, too, but probably much, much less than you (only on Saturday nights, because it apparently wasn't available on the local version of PBS at other times)
Oh definitely. There was a period when we were only allowed to watch PBS because our parents were concerned we were watching too much television. It's how I started watching The MacNeil/Lehrer Report[*] because two boring old guys reading news was still better than finding something else to do that wasn't watching television. (I drew the line at the financial news, however.)

My memories of [tʰeɪ̭mz] are connected to the graphic for Thames Television which appeared at the end of every episode of The Tomorrow People, a 70s scifi show that was rebroadcast on Nickelodeon in the 80s. (Not to be confused with the US remake it broadcast in the 90s.) At that age, I knew how to look pronunciations up in dictionaries, so it's possible I did and got it slightly mangled.

[*] Incidentally, I owe a debt to Robert MacNeill for getting me interested in linguistics. In 1986, he produced and narrated a show called The Story of English and not only did I watch the whole thing but I got the book as well and reread it to the point that I basically memorised it.

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by jal »

Vijay wrote:I used to pronounce Thames [θeɪ̭mz], too.
I think I did as well. It doesn't help the Dutch pronunciation is /teɪms/.


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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by Vijay »

linguoboy wrote:There was a period when we were only allowed to watch PBS because our parents were concerned we were watching too much television.
This is something that's never happened in my life. I'm not sure I could even stand watching TV for more than two-and-a-half hours straight. (Most Indian movies really try my patience, which is why I try not to watch them unless I know they're going to be good).

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by linguoboy »

jal wrote:Pfff... when I was young, we only had two Dutch tv channels, and iirc three German ones. That was it. Cable happened only years later.
We didn't get cable until I was a tween. Still, I grew up with six channels (the Big Three plus PBS and two UHF channels that mostly ran old movies) and there was always something on you could make yourself watch.

Speaking of Dutch, have I mentioned Gouda? Like 99% of USAmericans, I pronounced this /ˈguːdə/ until I went to Germany. There was a Dutch-American girl in our programme who taught us all to say /ˈxaudə/.

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by jal »

linguoboy wrote:There was a Dutch-American girl in our programme who taught us all to say /ˈxaudə/.
Then she either taught you wrong or you misremembered. It's actually /ˈxɑuda/ or /ˈxʌuda/ :). Though depending on her accent, it might've come across as /ˈxɐuda/ (but the final vowel is /a/, definitely not /ə/).


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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by linguoboy »

jal wrote:
linguoboy wrote:There was a Dutch-American girl in our programme who taught us all to say /ˈxaudə/.
Then she either taught you wrong or you misremembered. It's actually /ˈxɑuda/ or /ˈxʌuda/ :). Though depending on her accent, it might've come across as /ˈxɐuda/ (but the final vowel is /a/, definitely not /ə/).
Dude, we only have one /au/ diphthong in English. Mine varies from [æʊ̭] to [ɐʊ̭] to [ɑʊ̭] depending on the context.

We're not talking about how I pronounce "Gouda" in Dutch but how I pronounce it in English. I may codeswitch with proper names, but not generally when they're used to designate varieties of food products. As it is, I generally have to repeat the word with the /ˈɡuːdə/ pronunciation for people to know what I'm talking about.

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by jal »

linguoboy wrote:We're not talking about how I pronounce "Gouda" in Dutch but how I pronounce it in English.
Well, you said "[she] taught us all to say /ˈxaudə/." I assumed she taught you the right pronunciation. But I now understand she taught you some basterdized version to match American English pronunciation :).


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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by linguoboy »

jal wrote:
linguoboy wrote:We're not talking about how I pronounce "Gouda" in Dutch but how I pronounce it in English.
Well, you said "[she] taught us all to say /ˈxaudə/." I assumed she taught you the right pronunciation. But I now understand she taught you some basterdized version to match American English pronunciation :).
She taught us [ˈxʌu̯daː] and we adapted this to American English phonetics so as not to sound too pretentious.

(I don't know why I feel the need to defend the poor woman against aspersions 25 years after the fact, but there you go.)

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by jal »

linguoboy wrote:She taught us [ˈxʌu̯daː] and we adapted this to American English phonetics so as not to sound too pretentious.
(I don't know why I feel the need to defend the poor woman against aspersions 25 years after the fact, but there you go.)
Not too pretentious, no :).


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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by linguoboy »

I just discovered the word is spelled enmity, not emnity. Which makes sense etymologically, but sounds totally wrong. Like no matter how many times I say /ˈɛnmɪtiː/ to myself, I can't get it to sound acceptable. I don't think there's a word in my active vocabulary with an /nm/ sequence like that that I don't assimilate. (E.g. enmesh is [ɪmʹmɛʃ] IMD.)

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by Travis B. »

For me /n/ assimilates to following labials as [m] universally, including across word boundaries. (There's this bridge here in Milwaukee named the Hoan Bridge, and I always thought of it as the Home Bridge as a little kid because the only pronunciation I knew was the one with /n/ assimilated as [m]. Likewise I thought of in between as a single word "imbetween" for the longest time.)
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Re: Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlea

Post by Ryusenshi »

For a long time, I thought fuzz had the FOOT vowel.

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