Re: VW (was: Digest 2 Apr)
| From: | J Matthew Pearson <pearson@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, April 5, 2001, 23:08 |
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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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