Re: YAEPT: Voiceless TH in whether, worthy

On 11/13/06, Jonathan Knibb <jonathan_knibb@...> wrote:
> Oh, I see what you mean. Well, the most common pronunciation is probably
> /plA:z@/, using English phonemes, but I suspect most people feel it to
> be a foreign word and vacillate accordingly,
That's the part that struck me as weird.  To me, "plaza" /'plæzə/ is a
thoroughly ordinary, thoroughly Anglicized word, utterly divorced from
any Continental trappings.  Maybe that has something to do with
growing up around zillions of strip malls with names like "Stantom
Plaza" and the like ("shopping center" is definition 3 in the AHD).

> 'Ibiza' OTOH varies only in the first vowel - /aI/ or /I/ - and
> otherwise only with the speaker's accent. Many of Thomas Weir's teeming
> hordes would have something like [OIbi:f@] :)
Well, I haven't had much call to talk about Ibiza outside of Monty
Python references, but in my memory the Anglicized pronunciation is
usually /I'biz@/, sometimes /'aIbIz@/; I can't imagine someone
pronouncing it with /aI/ and /i/ in the same utterance; that's Just
Plain Wrong. :)   Interestingly, the AHD gives only the Spanishlike
pronunciations /i'bisa/ and /i'BiTa/.

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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