Finnish English

Roger Mills  wrote:
>
>John Vertical wrote:
> > Anyway, practically everyone here pronounces "New York" as
> > /ny: jo:k/ or some variation thereof. The fronting applies widely
> > to word-final /ju:/, and some people (like me) extend this to
> > various other environments - at its worst, to all non-initial
> > positions. The /y:/ in question tends to be a [y:] proper only in
> > the speech of people with little to none English fluency.
> > Eg. I pronounce "few new clues" as something like [fHu\ n_jHu\
> > k_hlHu\s] and definitely not [fy: ny: kly:s]
>
>To me is sounds as if you've simply adopted the local pronunciation
>of that  particular name, New York, which in turn is probably based
>on Swedish _ny_  or maybe just some local deformation.......
>Would you pronounce [ny:] in a less-known name, say, New Brunswick, New
>Haven, Newton Upper Falls :-)))??
Um, as explained, I would not pronounce *[y:]* in ANY English word (except
maybe for parody reasons)... but what I call /y:/ I do use in all instances
of "new". You're probably right about the Swedish influence, but this also
applies to words where there is no instantly obvious Swedish cognate - say,
"few".


> > I could dig deeper into the stereotypical Finnish pronounciation of >
>English, but I guess you may have lost your interest already.
>
>Not at all.  I'm sure there's a "Finnish-English" accent, just as there are
>XXX-English accents in every country where Engl. is an acquired language--
>and for many, not as carefully studied (or taught), perhaps, as one might
>wish.
Certainly there is. But mostly it's just mapping English phonemes to Finnish
ones, mixed with a number of spelling pronounciations and L1 analogies.
You are right, however, that it's not really studied or taught as well as it
could. During the 10 years of English I read in school, I don't recall *any*
teacher or textbook explicitely mentioning that there are differences
between eg. English /U/ and Finnish /u/. (Of course we had audio material to
listen to for correct pronounciation, but said distinction and several
others are lost to Finnish ears.)

John Vertical

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