Re: CHAT: The [+foreign] attribute

Quoting And Rosta <a.rosta@...>:

> John Cowan:
> > There seems to be some evidence that for speakers of a language, there is
> > some other specific language that all foreign words are assumed to be in.
> > For English, it's French.
>
> I have the impression that Americans are more likely than British to
> apply the [+foreign] feature to a word, too.
I dunno.  My impression is that people mark [+foreign] in the
context with which they are most familiar.  Last time we had
this discussion, I mentioned the woman in Britain who invited
my professor to a restaurant that served [f@dZaIt@z], which
would at the very least get you strange looks in most of the
American Southwest where the word has been acquired through
speech rather from reading.  On the other hand, on _Are You
Being Served?_, Capt. Peacock quite distinctly says [niS]
rather than [nItS]. (Feel free to correct his assessment as
incorrect.) What's in common with these two instances?
Far more Britons have exposure to French, through schooling
or through travel, than to Spanish.  But conversely, far
more Americans have direct exposure to Spanish, through
schooling and through travel and in every day contacts, than
to French.  The result? More exposure means greater likelihood
to pronounce things as the other language group does.  And if
pronouncing foreign words as the foreigners do is more common
in America, this is probably a result of America being a more
multicultural society, not because Americans make a greater
effort to be "correct".

(One cannot in all justice speak about "American" behavior
in this respect.  People in Vermont are far more likely to
use French for their [+foreign] pronunciations than people
in El Paso, say, are.)

> (Somewhat tangentially, the discussion (& mention of the "empan[y]ada"
> in the text you posted the url to) prompts me to ask if anyone can
> suggest additions to the following list of common mispronunciations of
> nativized foreignisms, which I have collected from many many hours
> of watching American TV programmes:
> * coup de gras
> * chaise lounge
> * momento
> * lingeré
> * marquis/marquee of Queensbury [I only heard this once, so don't know
> if it's common])
I gather you mean [ku d@ greIs], [SeIz l&UndZ] or [tSeIz l&UndZ],
and [la~Z@reI] or [landz@reI], all of which are fairly common in
America. However, under the rules of phonological reduction in most
American dialects, both "momento" and "memento" would come out like
[m@mEntoU]/[m@mIntoU], so I don't see how those could be
mispronounced (if I understand you correctly).  I could envision
three pronunciations of <marquis>, only two of which I've heard:
['markwIs] (which refers to an English title of nobility), [mar'ki]
(the French title), and *[mar'keI], which I've never heard before.

You could add <niche> as [niS] or [nItS], the latter of which
is probably more common in America.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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