Why do North Americans ....

[Vanisle_BC]

Why do North Americans think (auld lang)'syne' is pronounced Zyne? Sets my teeth on edge! Or why say Parmesan as Parme-szchhhawwn, and why is Robert Burns, who always called himself Rab or Rabbie, Anglicised to Robbie?

Do they think it makes them sound internationally sophisticated? Good luck with that .

A Guid Ne'erday t'yes a'
Damn, these rum'n eggnog are good .....

[pepperhead212]

I'm guessing, but the pronouncement of parmesan as you refer to (been going on a long time, as my parents did that) may have come from the way reggiano is pronounced. Can't say about the others!

A couple things that crack me up: all the time I hear professionals in the food industry pronounce jalapeño as jalapeno, with a "long e", and no tilde on the n - the way my Dad pronounced it when I first heard about them! And something that many people mispronounce, sometimes the same people, is habanero, which they pronounce "habañero". How do they drop the tilde from the jalapeño, and add it to the habanero? You would think someone would have told them about it by now.

[Vanisle_BC]

How do they drop the tilde from the jalapeño, and add it to the habanero? You would think someone would have told them about it by now.

Well now you've told it, to me at least! I'd never noticed the presence/absence of tilde on those pepper names - probably because I seldom see it in advertising or on the internet. And I've been mispronouncing habanero (here my spellchecker suggests I mean handbarrow!) all along - "thinking it makes me sound internationally sophisticated" ??

Anyway, @pepperhead212, thanks for joining my mini-rant. Now what about people who think that the plural of incident is incidences. What do they think incidence really means?

Oddly my spellchecker doesn't object to 'advertising' but insists on theoriZing - which, with my background, seems as ugly as Auld Lang Zyne.

Language is a living thing I guess; but I dislike some of its mutations; particularly if they muddy our communication.

[TomatoNut95]

IDK why ppl talk the way they do, IMO they speak the way they were raised in. TTYL!

[Vanisle_BC]

IDK why ppl talk the way they do, IMO they speak the way they were raised in. TTYL!

Probably right, but why did the folks who raised them speak that way? Somebody had to start it, and some others had to copy them thinking it sounded - what, smart?

Hey, what will happen if the people who don't know or care about spelling can't even get IDK or TTYL right ????

[Vanisle_BC]

My pal who shares my pedantic British origins gets his knickers in a knot if someone says 'gotten' instead of 'got.' I like to tease him by saying 'Oh, I'd forgot you don't like that'.

It's a funny language.

[pepperhead212]

Something that used to drive my sister crazy was all of the people on TV, often professionals, and politicians, saying "I seen ", instead of "I saw ". I used to do it sometimes, just to get to her.

[webmaster]

The Brits mispronounce Jalapeño as hala-peeno.

First time I heard that I nearly sprayed tequila all over my television set.

[Vanisle_BC]

@webmaster; Sorry, my computer has decided the compose key should stop working so the only tilde you can get today is this naked one ~.

All the folks I know of South American extraction are inaccessible due to Covid. Do you have a way to describe for me the 'correct' sound of the e in Jalapeno-with-a-tilde? Bear in mind that I do not understand the obscure symbols that language academics use to explain pronunciation.

By the way if you grew up in wartime Britain - or much of Europe - you'd be well past middle age before you even heard of peppers - sweet or hot - or Tequila (sorry about your TV.) I remember as a kid, seeing old adverts with pictures of bananas; wondering what such a bizarre looking fruit would taste like, and being severely disappointed when I found out as an adult.

Winston Churchill described Britons & Americans as two peoples divided by a single language. But there are regions inside each country, between which the citizens can't understand each other. In parts of Britain they can be as little as 50 miles apart. In fact it can even be true within cities, and not just in the UK, I suspect.

I watched a show the other night about the sailing ship Cutty Sark. My German-born daughter-in-law asked why it was called that and what did it mean, which led to a long conversation about vernacular dialects, Rabbie Burns' poetry and a plain-English synopsis of 'Tam o'Shanter'.

Have a good New Year, and thanks for what you do here.

[webmaster]

I watch enough British television that I can understand it better than American English TV programs.

But I have an acquaintance, I think from the NE England, maybe Yorkshire, who I can't understand a word he says. A friend from London or thereabouts told me not to feel too bad because he can't understand half of what he says either.

I was supposed to travel last year to London and then Brighton with a company I'm associated with. Possibly may be there in the fall. Would be my first time in Great Britain, very much looking forward to it.

The proper pronunciation is ha-la-penio

Pe like in pen, not like peen, but pen. Penio.

[Vanisle_BC]

The proper pronunciation is ha-la-penio

Pe like in pen, not like peen, but pen. Penio.

That's what I thought, or very close to it. (Different folks pronounce 'pen' quite differently.) But tell me, is it true that La Jolla and Lahoya are actually the same place?

Just kidding but it really was a while before I tumbled to it & connected the sound to the spelling.

Hope you get to Britain and enjoy it. In Scotland May is the most dependable month for weather. Don't know about England; that's foreign territory

[applestar]

Heh I’ve been enjoying the conversation exchange. I have no on topic contribution, but had to comment about the “dialects” — because I was just recently talking about that with my family in reference to Japanese ...specifically that there are dialects so extreme that folks from one area can’t understand what folks from another area are saying — that I can’t understand at all. Many people in Japan grow up with basically two languages — Standard Japanese which is taught in school and used by newscasters and basically every performer/TV-Radio personality are expected to enunciate perfectly ... and the dialect they grew up with.

I have spotty actual experience or knowledge — my mom used to fall back to native dialect when we were visiting her family when I was a kid ... and I did a pretty good approximation when we stayed for entire summer ... but lately, it seems to me that local dialects used by certain characters in TV shows or certain personalities have become more popular. There have been more YouTube videos that are just naturally being done by “native” dialect speakers — sometimes interviews with older generation that are being helpfully translated by the younger generation, etc.

Sometimes you see actors that you are familiar with all of a sudden talking fluently in a strange native dialect while being interviewed by the hometown local news, etc. I feel like it used to be considered a point of “embarrassment” that has become a point of “pride”. I guess in a way, I am getting old to be able to recognize that kind of disconnect, but I feel like it’s actually a good thing that they are becoming more “recognized” for their origins and who they really are.....

Yeah sorry, totally off topic.

[imafan26]

Regional accents are very different. Vowels do seem to be what people pronounce differently the most. The other would be whether the "h" in herb should be silent or not. Then there are the Southern drawls slowing and drawing out the words and regional phrasing.

In some countries like China and the Philippines there are many different dialects with not just pronunciation changes but using different words altogether.

My friends who learned English as a second language said that English is a hard language to learn. It is in the family of the Germance languages, but the rules of sentence structure are not as set as in other languages so it is harder to put a sentence together that sounds right. It makes a difference whether the words are spoken from the front or the back of the mouth. I think that is also why it is hard to translate Asian languages into English. Direct translations would be awkward. Not to mention that many languages use metaphors to communicate concepts. Some letters and consonants are hard to pronounce when it is pronounced in a different way in another language or the letter or syllables don't really exist in another language.

[webmaster]

Many people in Japan grow up with basically two languages — Standard Japanese which is taught in school and used by newscasters... and the dialect they grew up with.

I used to have a friend 30 years ago, half Japanese, born in the USA but grew up in Japan but moved away when he was around 12.

He was embarrassed to speak Japanese because he said that he only learned to speak a children's vocabulary, not an adult level of Japanese.

Is that true?

I grew up speaking (and reading) Spanish and English simultaneously. But because all my friends were and are non-Spanish speaking, my Spanish needs about a two week immersion before it feels normal to me.

In New Mexico the people there have a specific expectation of how street names are pronounced. So, Cerillos MUST be pronounced Ce-riyos and not ce-rilos. Failure to do so will get a public rebuke.

New England is very fussy about how cities and streets are pronounced.

In Massachusetts, pronouncing Amherst as Am-hurst might earn a raised eyebrow from a native though most people won't, as in New Mexico, politely correct you. The correct pronunciation is Am-murst. The H is silent.

[Gary350]

We all learn from our parents and they learned from their parents, many people don't know any better. I flunked English in school I have no clue what those symbols over top of letters mean but I made A+ in all science related classes. I like to hear people from England talk they pronounce words with all the correct letters. Americans pronounce certain words like certain letters missing or certain letter make the wrong sound. Things that irritate me are people that call cement blocks, Cinder Blocks. Cinder blocks were made illegal about 50+ years ago. Cinder blocks were make with burned coal cinders not gravel. And 50 years after voltage in the USA was standardized to 120 volts & people still say 110 volts. There is no such thing as 110 volts in USA. People in TN call a garden hose, Hose Pipe. Webster definition says, hose is flexible rubber & pipe is ridged steel. Hose pipe is impossible to have a rubber steel hose pipe. Drill motor is stupid too. There are, battery hand drills, 120 volt hand drills, drill presses, if you want a drill motor take a hand drill apart the motor is inside. People in England say, Car Park, that makes better sense than Americans that says, parking lot. In American Police arrest you but in England you get, Nicked. In American people give you Good Information but in Australia people give you, Good Drum & friends are mates. In England if you decide to leave to go someplace else people say, We are shooting off now, you better not say that is USA you might get arrested or offend someone. I had a travel job for 2 years I learned people in other States say things that other places don't say. In Hackensack NJ area, please means, pardon me. When I moved from Illinois to TN people talk so different in this area it was irritating, after 3 weeks I returned to visit relatives in Illinois to give my ears a rest, I returned to TN a week later my ears adjusted to TN talk it was no longer irritating. I am fixin to eat lunch.

[imafan26]

In Japan there are many regional accents and some special words. My mother grew up here, but her parents came from Yamaguchi prefecture. She did not like to talk to anyone in Japanese because she only knew "country" Japanese.
My aunt used to watch the Japanese song contest that is held on New Years day. She said she could not understand a lot of what they were saying because they talked too fast.

If I remember there are also some words that are age and gender specific. Only a young person would use the terms or the terms would only be applied to someone of a certain age like boku which is usually only used by young males to refer to themselves. It means "I". Once they get past a certain age, they would no longer use the term and say Watashi or watakushi instead. There are also the common and honorific forms.

Japan uses about 2500 kanji in everyday life (there are a lot more). The kanji can be read by Korean and Chinese with about the same meaning, but maybe a different pronunciation. Japan also has two kinds of alphabets. The baby katakana that children learn first and used mainly to spell foreign words and hiragana.

So far I have found a few common words and Kanji between Japanese and Mandarin
Ai (love) and san (the number three)

Regional accents are more global than you think and can vary a lot even within a country.

[Gary350]

In Japan there are many regional accents and some special words. My mother grew up here, but her parents came from Yamaguchi prefecture. She did not like to talk to anyone in Japanese because she only knew "country" Japanese.
My aunt used to watch the Japanese song contest that is held on New Years day. She said she could not understand a lot of what they were saying because they talked too fast.

If I remember there are also some words that are age and gender specific. Only a young person would use the terms or the terms would only be applied to someone of a certain age like boku which is usually only used by young males to refer to themselves. It means "I". Once they get past a certain age, they would no longer use the term and say Watashi or watakushi instead. There are also the common and honorific forms.

Japan uses about 2500 kanji in everyday life (there are a lot more). The kanji can be read by Korean and Chinese with about the same meaning, but maybe a different pronunciation. Japan also has two kinds of alphabets. The baby katakana that children learn first and used mainly to spell foreign words and hiragana.

So far I have found a few common words and Kanji between Japanese and Mandarin
Ai (love) and san (the number three)

Regional accents are more global than you think and can vary a lot even within a country.

I have heard Japan & China both have regional accents, and China has 3 different regional languages. I have heard Spanish language is slightly different for each country. I know a woman from Columbia South American that speaks a different Spanish than people in Argentina & both countries speak a different Spanish than people in Spain & Mexico. Our Church sends a bus load of volunteers to Mexico once a year across the border at Brownsville TX. The Spanish spoken in that 250 mile circle near TX is different from Spanish any where else in Mexico & different from all other Spanish speaking countries. When I was in college I dated a girl from Argentina she could talk to students from other Spanish speaking countries with some difficulty some words were different. The woman from Columbia South American can talk to Mexican people in town with not much difficulty & talk to other Spanish speaking people with not much difficulty either. She said, some words are completely different it takes a few seconds to learn what they say. I sorta under stand the different word problem because I live in TN and people here have words that are not spoken anywhere else in USA. Yonder way, ovar, upair, backair, fixin to, nary a one, & more.

[imafan26]

Actually, I think China because of its' size, age,history, and the number of tribes and clans probably has hundreds of different languages or dialects. China is a very old country and they border a few different countries. The Uyghurs speak a turkik language. They also have caucasian features although they are still Chinese nationals. Mongolia, is another large ethnic group. Most Chinese identify themselves as Han, but there are a muslim Hui minority, Nanjing older population still speaks a sub dialect of Nangjing Mandarin that originally was the Wu dialect of the Jin dynasty. After the fall of the Jins, the survivors fled south and settled around Nanjing. Jurchens are the ethnic group from NE China that are from Tanguska (Manchuria), and then the next largest ethnic group are the Zhuang are a Tai-speaking East Asian ethnic group who mostly live in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southern China. Some also live in the Yunnan, Guangdong, Guizhou and Hunan provinces. Not only their language, but their traditional dress, customs, food, and traditions are very different.

I think the same is true of the Latin languages and of the French, English, Portuguese,German, and other nationalities that ventured far from home for war or trade and stayed long enough to assimilate the local culture and traditions and adapt the ones they liked into their own culture. Wherever the Spanish colonized they interacted with the local populations and words, food, and customs were exchanged. It is true of other places as well. It is why the English introduced Curry to England. Why some words like "pan" are used in other countries who did not have a term for bread before. Then there is the debate about whether the Chinese or the Italians invented the noodle. Tomatoes came from the New World and brought back to Europe, but so ingrained in the food culture of Italy.

[Gary350]

Sleet, snow & grumble. WHAT is grumbler? There is a new weather lady on channel 2, this is not the first time I heard her say grumble. Every time she says grumble I think, I did not understand what she said. I have heard grumbler several times & today wife heard grumble too. Is this a new word they teach in meteorology school or is this a family word? Wife said, grumble sounds like rumble maybe grumble means, thunder. There are no thunder storms in the forecast & no thunder storms this time of the year. Maybe grumble is her word she uses that means bad weather but we are not having bad weather. We are having a very mild winter so far 52° and sunny today.

I flunked English I have no clue what long e is & no clue what this symbol means ñ, I never learned how to diagram a sentence, they don't teach that is school anymore. I don't remember what, verbs, nouns, & those other things are, I will never need that on a job application. I can't remember how to spell words I have not used in 50 years sense I graduated from school. I wish I could speak German, no way I can pass a German language class, I can't pass American language class.

When I went to HOA meetings people held a napkin on their left hand then held a drink on napkin with right hand to act proper or sophisticated. Why do people need to act special, why can't we act normal & be your self. OH wait, that is how sophisticated people ACT. I grew up on a dirt farm in Illinois I don't have a sophisticated bone in my whole body. A relative that is a news paper reporter told me, most people have a vocabulary of about 450 words, if I use words the average person don't know they won't read my news paper articles because they don't understand what I am saying. I use to know a woman that loved to impress people with her amazing vocabulary by talking with words few people ever heard, when she talked people rolled their eyes & walked away, I had no clue what she says, its not German or French?

Everyone has their own opinion what is important to them. Is it important for YOU to know which fork to pick up first at the dinner table. Is it important to you to know correct way to hold your napkin, Is it important to you to have a vocabulary of more than 450 words. Is it important to you to own an expensive car & own expensive house so people think your not low class. Are you offended by a person that drives a pickup truck or has a TV antenna on their house roof. People put them self in their own prison. I don't need to impress anyone and refuse to try.

I may be a spelling & English retard but I am good with math & technology. Immigrants are required to pass a written test to become a US citizen, I could never pass the same test, I have an excuse, I was born here. I would love to live in Germany for a few years.

[Vanisle_BC]

Spoken language is how we communicate and it's said to be what distinguishes us from all other animals - but I enjoy just having fun with words. English is great for that. Here's this word 'fleeting' - obviously derived from a verb. But where is the verb - why don't we see 'I fleet, you fleet, she fleets'; or 'I will fleet, I fleeted, I have flooten'?

How is it that my feet can smell and my nose can run?

If more than one mouse = mice, why not house -> hice? If goose -> geese how about moose -> meese or caboose -> cabeece. With sheep why isn't each one a shoop - and in fleece is each hair a floose?

Place name pronunciations can be weird and locals love to make fun of strangers who don't know how to say, for example: Anstruther (Ainster), Culross (Koo-ross), Edzell (Aigle) or Milngavie (M'l-Gigh). In America there's Hewston for Houston, Arkansaw for Arkansas & so on.

[imafan26]

Language is supposed to be what separates humans from animals. However, language is so complicated. Like the Tower of Babel, it is sometimes hard to understand. Just like how people pronounce words differently. Depending on where you are and context, words can have different meanings and connotations. LIke the word Kaffir which to me is the kaffir lime. But in S. Africa it is an extremely racist derogatory word.

Animals communicate more through smell and non-verbal actions. If you have a pet, you will understand what I mean. There is the sniffing to see where you have been, "sibling" rivalry if you don't follow the rules and norms of the house, tail and ear position, and the response or ignorance when your pet chooses not to "hear" you, the backlash if you do something they really don't like. People communicate non-verbally too, but sometimes that message isn't always clear because they say one thing, but their body language says something else.