Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[zompist]

I am always surprised that Americans preserve the nasal in pączki, since most Americans, including ones of Polish descent, that I have heard pronounce Polish names significantly anglicize them.

I went to grammar school with someone named "Konieczny". Her family pronounced it /kəˈniːzəˌniː/.

Reminds me of my schoolmate named Jendrzejczyk, pronounced /dʒɛn ˈdraj zək/.

(This must have been the family's pronunciation, because most Americans couldn't even mangle that name. "Jender--- how do you say that?")

[Pabappa]

I know I posted here before .... whether it was this thread or a thread on the old board I dont remember .... but Ive met Polish and Italian Americans who've developed idiosyncratic Americanized pronunciations of their names, and will even correct people who try to pronounce it in the manner of the original language. Italian names are not difficult to pronounce, but many Americans will add extra syllables to names like Gallucio and Migliaccio, or drop the final -e from names like Bonnepane. A third possibility is pronouncing Italian e as /i/, but this may have some basis in dialects of Italian, such as Sicilian. With Polish names I havent noticed a pattern ... e.g. the football player Alex Wojciechowicz went with a heavily Americanized pronunciation, except he still used /h/ for the <ch>.

[Zaarin]

A third possibility is pronouncing Italian e as /i/, but this may have some basis in dialects of Italian, such as Sicilian.

Which is in fact where many Italian-Americans originate.

Speaking of Americanizing names, my family name is German with a (word-internal) <z> which the family pronounces /z/ rather than /ts/. What's really fun is getting people to pronounce my Mom's family's name correctly: it's Dutch and begins with <sch> (Anglicized pronunciation /sk/), which Americans want to pronounce /ʃ/ like a German name (and indeed I know a number of German-Americans with a name that is spelled the same and I assume is etymologically equivalent).

[Travis B.]

I should note that the normal pronuciation here of final (but not word-internal) <e> in German names, /ə/ in Standard German, is /i/ as well. So this could just be a standard anglicization without regard to the language in question.

[Vijay]

Well, I will give a disclaimer that I don't know anything about the individual in question; my assumption that he's in North America was based on other features of his accent.

Now I'm curious what those features were and whether I can listen to him without causing some kind of ethics issue. Maybe I'm totally off-base here, but this kind of assumption can be a little tricky because some Indians in India (and probably more so these days than in earlier times) learn to adopt a lot, but not all, of the features of an American accent, probably by watching a shit ton of American TV. There's a joke from around the turn of the century that Indians speak neither British English nor American English but rather Disney English.

This kind of reminds me of how whenever I'm talking to Malayalees on Reddit, I make a conscious effort to speak only in Malayalam to them (if I can get away with it). They almost invariably respond to me in English. There's one guy who does that who I swear sounds like an American frat boy every time he does, which is pretty hilarious to me.

he very frequently used the filler word basically [ˈbɛ.sɪ.kʰɐˌ.li]

Hmm, that sounds like someone who's probably from the Hindi belt or somewhere close by and probably doesn't know how else to pronounce "basic."

[Salmoneus]

While lining up for pączki today, a coworker and I shared our love for the ones with apricot filing and I was struck by the difference in our pronunciation. It seems to me that food words in English have a disproportionate number of unpredictable alternations and that--even more interesting--several seem to vary arbitrarily without coinciding with other prominent isoglosses. Some examples:

apricot: /eː/ vs /æ/
salmon: /æ/ vs /æl/ vs /ɑ/
potato, tomato: /eː/ vs /ɑ/
basil: /eː/ vs /æ/

For the helluvit, I've underlined my values. I don't know that I even share them all with other members of my family, let alone with the regiolect of any particular place.

"Potato" with broad A is probably an urban myth, I think we've agreed.

"Apricot" and "basil" seem just to be US spelling pronunciations, presumably indicating an unfamiliarity with the concepts.

"Tomato" may be the same, or may reflect a difference in borrowing time. Wikipedia asserts that old long /a/ remained /a:/ until around 1550, before moving up to /{:/, then to /E:/ 'after 1600', and to /e:/ in some but not all areas by 1640 (it doesn't say when the breaking then happens). Words borrowed in the /a:/ stage, and probably the /{:/ stage, should be expected to end up as /eI/... and "potato", for a foodstuff that was dramatically rapidly adopted in the Old World, does indeed show this. Tomatoes, however, were probably much more alien to Britain until much later; at a similar time to the tail end of the GVS, the new /a:/ class was created, and later borrowings moved into it. This class was then everywhere backed to /A:/, and shortened in the US (and a few other places). The aberrent American pronunciation may indicate that in at least some of the US, the tomato was adopted by the colonists (it may be that /a:/ could even be borrowed as /E:/ if it happened before there the new /a:/ class emerged), before it was widely used in Britain. Alternatively, as I say, it could be a later spelling pronunciation.

"Salmon" and "almond" come from a much more troublesome place, the mess that English has made of French loanwords with nasals in them. In the case of "salmon", there was no /l/ at any point until recently. It would originally have been in alternation between /a/ and /au/, and /a/ won out (probably helps that it's a common word in Britain). However, wiktionary says Canadians have /A/, which is presumably a spelling pronunciation by comparison to PALM words. The US pronunciation with /l/ is then a much later speling pronunciation.

"Almond" likewise opted for /a/ rather than /au/ in the standard pronunciation, but must have suffered an intrusive /l/ from a spelling pronunciation early on, putting it into the PALM set, where the /l/ was then lost again, lengthening the vowel. The variant pronunciation with CAUGHT is presumably from a dialectical form in which /au/ was retained; this then regularly produced /O:/, as in 'shawm' and 'laundry'.

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Another example is "oregano", which I'm sure I've heard TV-Americans pronounce with stress on the second syllable.

And while we've mentioned 'potato', what about the traditional English pronunciation with final -er? Is this the result of a failure to understand spanish final /o/, or is it an early example of the -er diminutive?

[Pabappa]

Rural Appalachian English has final /o/>/ə/ and /ə/>/i/. E.g. "grand ole opry", "sody",etc and holler, feller, etc. Adding an R to the schwa may just be the intrusive r of nonrhotic dialects.

[alynnidalar]

Another example is "oregano", which I'm sure I've heard TV-Americans pronounce with stress on the second syllable.

Non-TV-Americans pronounce it that way too. However, that is where the Spanish stress falls.

[linguistcat]

Another example is "oregano", which I'm sure I've heard TV-Americans pronounce with stress on the second syllable.

Non-TV-Americans pronounce it that way too. However, that is where the Spanish stress falls.

You mean there are people who DON'T stress it on the second syllable? I mean I'm sure there are plenty but I don't think I've run into any that I know.

If I heard someone stress it differently it would be a little jarring for me, tbh. I'd go as far as to say, if I have heard someone say it a different way, I probably thought they were putting on some kind of affected accent for humor and waved it off.

[Salmoneus]

Rural Appalachian English has final /o/>/ə/ and /ə/>/i/. E.g. "grand ole opry", "sody",etc and holler, feller, etc. Adding an R to the schwa may just be the intrusive r of nonrhotic dialects.

Possibly, but it's always spelled "potater" and "tater", rather than "potata" and "tata", which to me suggests the final vowel isn't just a schwa.

Come to think of it, "tater" is also found as "tatter" (i.e. with shortening of the first vowel - anomolously? Or might this have occured in the initial borrowing, particularly if there was no /a:/ in the language at the time?). And of course as "tattie", with change of the last vowel to /i/. But that probably is just an -ie diminutive.

[Salmoneus]

Another example is "oregano", which I'm sure I've heard TV-Americans pronounce with stress on the second syllable.

Non-TV-Americans pronounce it that way too. However, that is where the Spanish stress falls.

You mean there are people who DON'T stress it on the second syllable? I mean I'm sure there are plenty but I don't think I've run into any that I know.

If I heard someone stress it differently it would be a little jarring for me, tbh. I'd go as far as to say, if I have heard someone say it a different way, I probably thought they were putting on some kind of affected accent for humor and waved it off.

The UK pronunciation is with stress on the third syllable, as would be expected in a borrowing - /Qr@gA:noU/.

[Linguoboy]

Another example is "oregano", which I'm sure I've heard TV-Americans pronounce with stress on the second syllable.

Non-TV-Americans pronounce it that way too. However, that is where the Spanish stress falls.

You mean there are people who DON'T stress it on the second syllable? I mean I'm sure there are plenty but I don't think I've run into any that I know.

If I heard someone stress it differently it would be a little jarring for me, tbh. I'd go as far as to say, if I have heard someone say it a different way, I probably thought they were putting on some kind of affected accent for humor and waved it off.

I've had precisely this experience.

Italian names are not difficult to pronounce, but many Americans will add extra syllables to names like Gallucio and Migliaccio, or drop the final -e from names like Bonnepane.

This could also be a dialectal feature, as the final -e is often absent in northern varieties.

It's not unusual for a surname to be spelled according to the standard orthography while the family pronunciation preserves a dialectal variant. I see this quite often with German-American surnames where the standard spelling has an umlaut vowel (Müller, König, etc.) but unrounding is a feature of the local spoken variety. In German-speaking countries, it's common for the older pronunciation to be replaced with a spelling pronunciation but that's obviously unlikely to happen here.

[Travis B.]

The pronunciation of oregano I am familiar with is /ɔːˈrɛɡənoʊ/ or /əˈrɛɡənoʊ/, with the stress on the second syllable.

[Linguoboy]

The pronunciation of oregano I am familiar with is /ɔːˈrɛɡənoʊ/ or /əˈrɛɡənoʊ/, with the stress on the second syllable.

Even this sounds slightly affected to me, to the point where I'm surprised to see it as the only US pronunciation listed in Wiktionary. Everyone I know has /eː/ there.

In German it appears there's variation between (standard) Oregano and (widespread) Oregano

I'm mildly surprised to find out this is a borrowing from Spanish. I associate oregano almost exclusively with Italian food so I'd always assumed the word was Italian.

[Travis B.]

I'm mildly surprised to find out this is a borrowing from Spanish. I associate oregano almost exclusively with Italian food so I'd always assumed the word was Italian.

I too thought the word was of Italian origin - this is the first place I have seen it stated that it was of a different origin.

[Linguoboy]

I'm mildly surprised to find out this is a borrowing from Spanish. I associate oregano almost exclusively with Italian food so I'd always assumed the word was Italian.

I too thought the word was of Italian origin - this is the first place I have seen it stated that it was of a different origin.

The Standard Italian word is origano. I would have expected, as a consequence, that some North Americans of Italian descent might pronounce the word /ɔˈriːɡənoː/ but so far I've never encountred that.

[Zaarin]

Well, I will give a disclaimer that I don't know anything about the individual in question; my assumption that he's in North America was based on other features of his accent.

Now I'm curious what those features were and whether I can listen to him without causing some kind of ethics issue. Maybe I'm totally off-base here, but this kind of assumption can be a little tricky because some Indians in India (and probably more so these days than in earlier times) learn to adopt a lot, but not all, of the features of an American accent, probably by watching a shit ton of American TV. There's a joke from around the turn of the century that Indians speak neither British English nor American English but rather Disney English.

This kind of reminds me of how whenever I'm talking to Malayalees on Reddit, I make a conscious effort to speak only in Malayalam to them (if I can get away with it). They almost invariably respond to me in English. There's one guy who does that who I swear sounds like an American frat boy every time he does, which is pretty hilarious to me.

he very frequently used the filler word basically [ˈbɛ.sɪ.kʰɐˌ.li]

Hmm, that sounds like someone who's probably from the Hindi belt or somewhere close by and probably doesn't know how else to pronounce "basic."

My NDA prevents me from sharing the file or discussing the actual content of the file, I'm afraid. But based on what you said they may well have been in India then; I was under the impression that Indian English was more British, which was the only basis for my assumption they were in North America. English was definitely not their first language, though the one speaker was more proficient in it than the other two (but alas for the ease of my job, she spoke the least).

[zompist]

The pronunciation of oregano I am familiar with is /ɔːˈrɛɡənoʊ/ or /əˈrɛɡənoʊ/, with the stress on the second syllable.

Even this sounds slightly affected to me, to the point where I'm surprised to see it as the only US pronunciation listed in Wiktionary. Everyone I know has /eː/ there.

Apparently we don't discuss condiments enough. /ɛ/ for me.

[Vijay]

I have /ɛ/, too. I probably used to say something like [ʔɔɹɨˈgɑnow], though, and I guess some people still do.

My NDA prevents me from sharing the file or discussing the actual content of the file, I'm afraid.

That's okay, I kinda figured as much.

[Raphael]

Unrelated to the ongoing discussions:

I've only recently learned about an apparent dialect of English that, based on the only contexts in which I've heard it so far, might be described as something like "Northeastern US Upper Class". It sounds interesting, if perhaps a bit annoying - as if someone had taken a generic American English accent and added just a little bit of a posh British upper class accent. The only two people I've heard using it so far are Meryl Streep playing the role of Kay Graham in the movie The Post - and I don't know how much of that was Streep and how much of that was Streep's impression of Graham - and Democratic Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, who represents an electoral district about which Wikipedia helpfully informs me that it is 'popularly known as the "silk stocking district"'.

It's fascinating to discover that there's apparently an entire, fairly distinct sounding, dialect of American English that I didn't know about before.