Heh, the first thing I thought of was “what about Guangzhou?” but I didn’t realize that was Cantonese.
そうね、だから英語が難しいんだよ。誰も聞いてない。文字に騙されるの。目が理解するけど、耳はじぇーんじぇーん聞いてないよね！通訳者がまっくろくろすけの穴に落ちました。
- Preamble: Internal vs. external evidence and language-contact phenomena
Hyperforeignization — as, for example, in the frequent American English pronunciation of lingerie as “pseudo-French” /ˈlæn.ʒə.ɹi/ rather than real French /lɛ̃ʒ.ʁi/ — provides what could be considered maximally external evidence for the reality of rules as valid linguistic generalizations, because such hyperforeignisms often show speakers displaying systcmaticity and productivity in the application of general patterns to novel non-native contexts. Facts of this sort expand the range of evidence for rules overall; in addition, they support the claim that many (if not most) rules arc actually “local generalizations” which typically range over lexically quite limited sets of data, rather than vast, more globally defined linguistic domains (cf. Joseph and Janda 1988).
I always thought things like this and the “ghoti = fish” were strained, because “gh-” can’t stand for “p-” or “f-” at the beginning of the word, “-tte” can’t stand for “-t-” in the middle, and “-ti” can’t stand for “-sh” at the end. That’s just not how English works. There are plenty of ways of showing how wonderfully illogical and muddled English spelling is without that sort of nonsense.
1 Like
There’s nothing particularly French about the /zh/ sound is there? e.g. vision, leisure.
I’d guess that the change from Mandarin is because in English pronunciation, consonants get adjusted to match their surroundings; bay-zhing is just easier to come up with (for a native english-speaking mouth) than bay-jing.
It can’t until we steal a word from some other language that does that, anyway. It’s kind of what English does.
1 Like
I’m a native speaker and my ears don’t understand English sometimes. Getting married made that very clear.
2 Likes
leisure and vision aren’t spelled with Js.
in the ipa alphabet
/beɪˈdʒɪŋ/ is correct
/beɪˈʒɪŋ/ is hyperforiegn
It’s not the spelling, it’s the pronunciation that’s the key here: in both words, there’s a /zh/ sound.
MEIHEM IN CE KLASRUM by Dolton Edwards (a riff on a Mark Twain story, I think.)
try this on for size:
https://translate.google.com/#fr/en/jejune
click on the speaker icons to hear the difference between a french ‘j’ and an english ‘j’
LL and Y are supposed to be different and people in central to northern Spain will pronounce them differently, but not so in Andalusia or Latin America.
Confusion of ll and y, of b and v and of omitting or inserting h’s are the most common spelling errors in Spanish that I’ve seen.
Funnily enough, in some regions of Andalusia there’s actually a pretty weak pronunciation of H, like a subtle aspiration. Even more funnily, speakers don’t always seem to be aware of this, so many people will happily pronounce “hacer”, “hacha” etc. with a weak H but omit it when they write.
1 Like
Hell, I had to learn a new language when I moved to Pittsburgh. Its “Pixberg” and “the Stillers”, along with learning what a grinnie and a bubbler were. (a chipmonk and a water fountain) A “cupboard” is where you hang your jackets coming into the house, its also any closet or actual cupboard in the kitchen.
1 Like
Busby needs to calm the F down.
So, that would make the correct spelling of potato to be ‘POUGHPHTHEIGHTEAU’ then.
Ok, I guess that would make this a lot less silly… 
1 Like
You were right the first time, Guangzhou is the Mandarin name/pronunciation, not the Cantonese one.
Looks similar to Dutch to me, but (disclaimer) I don’t actually speak any Dutch.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
