In Chicago, we had a good friend who kept talking about her "french room" and I was finally like what the hell is that. Turns out, it was the "front room."
Such a fun and fascinating essay! My daughter is taking a linguistic class in college, and I am going to (gonna?) send this to her, because she will enjoy it!
Your bit about the different pronunciations in British and American English made me laugh, because our choir, made up of Swiss women plus me, just had our concert, which featured Motown songs. I had to teach the Swiss ladies to sing the American way--converting t to d and dropping the g from ing, as you note.
Another friend is a different choir, and there are no Americans. They sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” and it was pretty funny to hear them articulating the words so precisely (“do you” instead of the American “do ya”) that the rhymes didn’t work.
What's funny is that people are often unaware of their own accents. Some American will write "readin'" and "writin'" as slang, as if they themselves don't say that.
"Gonna" is really fun too, because the fact that it once meant "going to" is almost unrecognizable. I believe they say "gon" in AAVE, which is even less recognizable. Maybe it eventually becomes just g sound, so the English future tense for "talk" become "gutalk"
I’m a native speaker, but I still had to take a German pronunciation class in college to graduate with my German lit degree. It was completely fascinating. I just never thought about where in the mouth certain sounds happen and how the same sound “feels” completely different across different languages.
I found the example of the “r” in “butter” really interesting.
There's at least 10 trillion German dialects so it's hard to generalize, but they almost always use the guttural R or trilled R. A rounded R (as is standard in English) is almost always a giveaway that someone doesn't speak German.
In Dutch, the trilled R is the most common, but apparently cartoons are made in a town that uses the English R. So it's something that makes you sound like a cartoon character lol
Later in college, I got to take a class on German dialect! In a lot of cases, you can tell what region of the country the dialect is from by which continents shifted. You can tell a lot about the elevation at which a person was born from whether they say was/das or wat/dat.
Yes, I've heard that. One thing a lot of people don't realize is that, when it comes to consonants, English is the more conservative one. Proto-Germanic "water" was "watr," with the consonants (roughly) matching modern English. It was the Germans who moved the t to and s in the Old Germanic consonant shift. Then, later, the "w" moved to the "v" sound.
I'm not going to say that English sounds much like Proto-germanic. It does not. But the consonants are closer than what you hear in German.
In Chicago, we had a good friend who kept talking about her "french room" and I was finally like what the hell is that. Turns out, it was the "front room."
Such a fun and fascinating essay! My daughter is taking a linguistic class in college, and I am going to (gonna?) send this to her, because she will enjoy it!
Your bit about the different pronunciations in British and American English made me laugh, because our choir, made up of Swiss women plus me, just had our concert, which featured Motown songs. I had to teach the Swiss ladies to sing the American way--converting t to d and dropping the g from ing, as you note.
Another friend is a different choir, and there are no Americans. They sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” and it was pretty funny to hear them articulating the words so precisely (“do you” instead of the American “do ya”) that the rhymes didn’t work.
What's funny is that people are often unaware of their own accents. Some American will write "readin'" and "writin'" as slang, as if they themselves don't say that.
"Gonna" is really fun too, because the fact that it once meant "going to" is almost unrecognizable. I believe they say "gon" in AAVE, which is even less recognizable. Maybe it eventually becomes just g sound, so the English future tense for "talk" become "gutalk"
I’m a native speaker, but I still had to take a German pronunciation class in college to graduate with my German lit degree. It was completely fascinating. I just never thought about where in the mouth certain sounds happen and how the same sound “feels” completely different across different languages.
I found the example of the “r” in “butter” really interesting.
There's at least 10 trillion German dialects so it's hard to generalize, but they almost always use the guttural R or trilled R. A rounded R (as is standard in English) is almost always a giveaway that someone doesn't speak German.
In Dutch, the trilled R is the most common, but apparently cartoons are made in a town that uses the English R. So it's something that makes you sound like a cartoon character lol
Later in college, I got to take a class on German dialect! In a lot of cases, you can tell what region of the country the dialect is from by which continents shifted. You can tell a lot about the elevation at which a person was born from whether they say was/das or wat/dat.
Yes, I've heard that. One thing a lot of people don't realize is that, when it comes to consonants, English is the more conservative one. Proto-Germanic "water" was "watr," with the consonants (roughly) matching modern English. It was the Germans who moved the t to and s in the Old Germanic consonant shift. Then, later, the "w" moved to the "v" sound.
I'm not going to say that English sounds much like Proto-germanic. It does not. But the consonants are closer than what you hear in German.
Now that I think about it, we "flap" the t in water so this isn't a great example. But the I guess it would have sounded like English ~300 years ago.
I didn’t know that - really interesting stuff.