Re: Idiolects

In a message dated 1/29/02 10:49:48 PM, draqonfayir@JUNO.COM writes:

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>On Tue, 29 Jan 2002 19:10:52 -0800 Elliott Belser <renyard@...>
>writes:
>> >Hello all!
>> >All the talk on how we all seem to have odd ways of
>> >pronouncing things makes me want to propose a
>> >hypothesis: that linguistically inclined people are so
>> >sensitive to sound that they overcompensate when they
>> >speak...Maybe?  How does this sound?
>
>> Well, my little brother gets upset when I pronounce the Legend 'o
>> Zelda villain Ganondorf's name as Gah-NOWHN-dorf instead of
>> GA-non-dorf the way everyone else does... and god forbid my Hebrew
>> teacher catching me trying to make a vowel attached to a Ayin come
>> from the back of my throat!
>-
>
>They don't like you pronouncing the `ayin?  I didn't really start using
>it until college, and i haven't really taken any Hebrew language courses
>here until this semester which just started, so i haven't had any
>reaction to it.  Although a friend who used to be co-head of the Hebrew
>Speakers Club said that i sound "ethnic", whatever that means :-P
Means that you sound different (and more authentic, if they said it in a nice
way) than the average Hebrew speaker :-) There definitely are different
"registers" of Hebrew for me. For example, in Hebrew class I pronounce my r's
uvularly, since the teacher's Israeli and I'm trying to have a good Israeli
accent. But if I'm reading something in synagogue I would never do that...
it's just not what's done there! Unless someone is Israeli or lived in Israel
for a long time, the normal thing is to use a distinctly American accent
there, with an American 'r', though at least we distinguish /E/ from /e/. The
only time I pronounce pharyngeal anything is when I'm singing along to
Yemenite music (as well as in Structure of Arabic class the other day, when
we had our phonetics lesson).

Josh Roth
http://members.aol.com/fuscian/eloshtan.html

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