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Finnish English

From:John Vertical <johnvertical@...>
Date:Monday, December 12, 2005, 11:41
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

Replies

<veritosproject@...>
Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>