[Multilingual Monday] Why in Dubai do they lie about the fries?

[aadroma]

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

Comments

[zurcherart]

So where was his accent from?

According to the rhyme scheme I pronounced most of that correctly ... but you might find it interesting that I got tripped up by dies, war, and billet.

Dies because I read it as in die's and der's, war because I pronounce my w's like I used to pronounce my v's (like WW2 villain on the first season of Wonder Woman/Vondar Voman), and billet because I tried to pronounce it the Swiss German way decided I was wrong pronounced it the French way and rhymed it with ballet (we use the French work for ticket in Swiss German but not the pronunciation which is more or less like the English word billet).

My Swiss German/Texas/Picayune, MS Souix Falls, SD influenced accent is really mixed up by now. But Northern Germans seen to think my accent is Bayerisch if I'm speaking German to them :)

[progbear]

Why is this post reminding me of the first Sade album, with its “helpful” pronunciation guide “Shar-Day” right on the cover. Which is only “helpful” if the reader is British or Australian. Ever since then, North Americans have been mispronouncing her name with an “R” sound.

[bluebear2]

So that's why people add an R in her name. Never knew where that came from.
And what about the Marquis de Shardey?

[paulintoronto]

My partner and I stayed in a B and B in New Zealand, and the owner invited us to have a glass of wine in the early evening, adding that we should feel free to take it to the beed room. I was genuinely puzzled, picturing a salon decorated with beads, until the context made it clear that she was talking about our bed room. The next day, we hit the road and on the car radio heard a DJ introduce a song by saying, "It's bin teen years since this song was a hit."

[muckefuck]

The joke they used to tell in my linguistics class about the Kiwi accent was this:

An Englishman is visiting New Zealand and decides to look up and old school friend who relocated there ages ago. He comes to the address, sees a boy out front, and launches into an explanation of who he is and why he's come. The boy tells him:

"He's dead, mate."

Before the poor man can recover from his shock, he gets another shock as he sees his friend walk to him and shake his hand.

("He's dead" = "Here's Dad")

[muckefuck]

Also, this:

(Contains NSFW language.)

[muckefuck]

I just got into a long discussion on Facebook because of this somewhat douchy article. For the record, I say "sherbert" (I didn't even realise this wasn't the original spelling until I was well into my teens), "upmost" (but almost everybody does--it's a garden-variety assimilation of the type that goes unnoticed in your speech hundreds of times every day), "perscription"/"perogative" (I also drop /r/ in words like surprise and used to say Febuary and liberry), and "cannidate" (I simplify nd to n in all sorts of words). And, needless to say, I was in full-on Radical Descriptivist mode. As I told one poster, I can't stand it when people turn pronunciation into a game of "gotcha", seeking out reasons to feel superior to other people.