[Multilingual Monday] Why in Dubai do they lie about the fries?
So I've been doing Google Hangout a LOT. One of the guys who frequents has a fairly noticable accent, where /aj/ (as in "thigh" or "why")'s glide becomes dulled and becomes /æ:/. The accent is really nothing of the ordinary and I wouldn't have really said anything about it until I head his pronunciation of "Dubai" as /duˈbæ:/, and for whatever reason it kind of jarred me as I've never heard it pronounced quite like that (since I've almost always heard /duːˈbaɪ/, and so I gave him hell, and I went too far, as he got pretty pissed at me.
The positive side of all of this, is that I get an article about it, and it resulted in the posting of the The Speech Accent Archive, where people from around the world read the same sentence, and the site analyses the unique attributes of each accent. It's fascinating, though I would LOVE to see this in other languages ("how does someone born in Kansas pronounce this German sentence?"). Does that exist? I'd love to know.
The concept of "incorrect" pronunciation had also resulted in the posting of this poem, where the intro states that "if you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world." Of course, what CONSTITUTES correct pronunciation isn't actually stated ... (and it IS a UK site so ... :: laugh ::).
Does anyone have any fun pronunciation stories? I'd love to hear them!
The positive side of all of this, is that I get an article about it, and it resulted in the posting of the The Speech Accent Archive, where people from around the world read the same sentence, and the site analyses the unique attributes of each accent. It's fascinating, though I would LOVE to see this in other languages ("how does someone born in Kansas pronounce this German sentence?"). Does that exist? I'd love to know.
The concept of "incorrect" pronunciation had also resulted in the posting of this poem, where the intro states that "if you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world." Of course, what CONSTITUTES correct pronunciation isn't actually stated ... (and it IS a UK site so ... :: laugh ::).
Does anyone have any fun pronunciation stories? I'd love to hear them!