CHAT: Pronunciation (Re: Whiteness?)

Barry Garcia wrote:

> CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU writes:
> >Right.  But that's exactly what I'm talking about:  English speaking
> >people
> >using English, which happen to have words that have been borrowed, and
> >assimilated into English.  Your comment sounded in this context like you
> >were disparaging other English speakers' speech simply because they don't
> >pronounce e.g. <rodeo> as [rodeo] but as [roudiou].
>
> Sorry i wasnt clear as to what I was speaking about. I'm not patient in a
> language class when people should have learned pronunciation. But day to
> day, i excuse it because well, theyre not speaking a foreign language
> then. For instance, my uncles from Kansas came here and said "San Jose" as
> "san josie".  It amused me, but I let it pass, because normally when i'm
> not trying to speak Spanish, i dont even say the names as they would in
> Spanish (to me, i feel like i'm being pretentious). .
I understand the feeling.  Just yesterday, I was in College Bowl practice when
a member of the other team rang in on a question whose answer was "Aachen",
which he pronounced /&k@n/ (this particular person seems oblivious to foreign
pronunciations).  I felt obliged to correct him in this one instance because he had
been mispronouncing virtually every foreign word that evening, of which there were
many, and so it had become quite annoying. Normally instead of correcting people,
I simply repeat the phrase or word in question in the next statement I make somewhere,
so as to let them know, hopefully somewhat subtly.   I find it obnoxious that people
sometimes take this to be pretension:  I see it as honoring and respecting people who
speak a different language than I do by showing interest in them in this way, not as
being somehow "correct" in my pronunciation, since there is no objective meaning
to that word anyways. And when I hear someone else trying, but failing, to pronounce
the name or phrase according to the normal foreign usage, I still feel they have done
the right thing.

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Tom Wier   |     "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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