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Re: VW (was: Digest 2 Apr)

From:J Matthew Pearson <pearson@...>
Date:Thursday, April 5, 2001, 23:08
David Peterson wrote:

> I've had the exact same experience with German speakers I know. It's also > funny to me how my grandma (Mexican) pronounces "chair" as [SEr], since they > have a [tS] in their language, and even looks orthographically exactly the > same.
Could be a case of overcompensation. I routinely hear English speakers pronounce "Beijing" as [beI.ZIN], even though [beI.dZIN] is closer to the Mandarin pronunciation. It's as though English speakers are responding to the foreignness of the name by substituting an atypical pronunciation of "j", [Z], for the more usual pronunciation of this letter, [dZ]. Another example is when people pronounce the final word in the expression "coup de grace" as [gra], even though the correct French pronunciation, [gras], is closer to the that of the nativized English word "grace" [greIs]. They seemed to have learned that final consonant sounds get dropped in French, and so they apply this rule even in contexts where they shouldn't. Matt.

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Barry Garcia <barry_garcia@...>