Talk:Non-native pronunciations of English/Archive 2

message: Does this come under pronunciation? -- Paddu 10:18, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Shaking of heads by Indians 

message: The article about how Brazilians speak English is lovely: "cheecher" LOL.
In the article, it lacks:
if a Brazilian says Happy and Rap in English. Both sounds sound the same: "rapi" (with a Portuguese/french-like r). -Pedro 18:20, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Brazilians speeking English 

message: I've noticed that people from Scandinavia often have no distinguishable accent at all, and often sound like native born speakers. A famous example - Famke Janssen.
I don't just mean speak English well - people can speak English fluently but still have a noticable accent - but Scandinavians seem to naturally adopt the accent of whatever country they are in -US, Australia etc.
: Janssen's Dutch, actually (not Scandinavian).  Iben Hjejle (from (Denmark) is a better example.  According to the High Fidelity DVD director's commentary, Stephen Frears really loved the way she looked in Mifune, but despaired that she wouldn't sound American, until he found out that she had learned English by spending four years or so in the U.S.  That might be the case with Janssen, or maybe she's just really good at accents.  She is an actress, after all - a lot of them (though certainly not all) are excellent at assuming different accents (see Christian Bale - he's Welsh, but he often plays Americans, and I bet a lot of Americans have no idea).  For what it's worth, I've met a few Scandinavians (two Danes, one Swede), and they all had noticeable accents.  --Skoosh 19:50, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Scandinavians 

message: This article survived a Vote for Deletion. The discussion can be found here. -Splash 18:10, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Vote for Deletion

message: Can someone (I will try to do it in the future if I have time) add some information about the various accent features which arise due to differences in timing, i.e. syllable timing and stress timing? ~ Dpr 08:35, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Timing/stress

message: I would dispute that Scottish pronunciation of English should even be on this page.  In practice virtually all Scots speak English as their first and only language, and as a dialect (Scots) it has been spoken for over a thousand years in Scotland, and survives in a form probably closer to Old English than the English spoken in England.  To say that it is non-native is not even insulting, it is just incorrect.
:: You're right.  Both the Irish and Scottish accents, while possibly distinguished because of their roots in second-language learning from their respective native celtic language, are characterized elsewhere in Wikipedia as native and we should be consistent.  There is also a trend in India towards a similar situation since there are numerous native speakers of Indian English.  I shall remove Irish and Scottish from this page.  AEuSoes1 19:25, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Scottish 

message: I wondered there was not told about possible pronunciation of /S/ by Swedishs as a [x\] and /u/ as a [}]. I've learned Swedish a bit but it is only my own ideas and I would like to know how it is in reality. 
First. In literarry Swedish /S/ — as in common words so also in borrowings — can be pronounced as a [x\], voiceless palatal-velar fricative. In my native language (Ukrainian, Russian) the same can appear as a speech defect, and that who has got it can hardly pronounce a normal [S]. Very hardly. And in Swedish, where  [x\] is a competent allophone of /S/, i think in could be totally impossible for some speakers to pronounce a [S]. Isn't it so?
Second. In normal Swedish all short letters U are pronounced as [}] (close central rounded vowel), even in the word automobil :) . So could they pronounce, for example, the word put as [p}t], no?
::According to the Swedish phonology page, Swedish has  (the vowel in put) as a short vowel and /u/ as a long vowel.  This is exactly the same as in English and the only reason a speaker would use the close central vowel for English's short u would be because the words with those sounds are generally spelled with o and  is spelled with u.  
::As for , there are a number of sounds in Swedish that could be transfered over such as  and  (both of which can be allophones of ).  Swedish speakers may have difficulty with the sh sound in English but according to the transcriptions at this website  speakers showed little difficulty with  and none of them pronounced it as .   AEuSoes1 03:26, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: As to your first point, the Swedish people I have heard speaking have had no trouble with the English . As to using  (according to the Swedish language article, it's actually , but never mind) for , I have not heard a Swede do that. Swedish has a phoneme  which is similar-enough to the English value that it's not a problem, even though in Swedish it's spelt "o" (I think) ... consider that English often uses a short u for more open, unrounded vowel, AmE/RP , AusE , so foreigners are probably not going to overgeneralise that way... And for the long vowel, Swedish  is almost the same as AusE  that I can't hear the diff... I've met more than a few Swedes, as I work at Ikea (some Swedes have surprised me and other Australians when they said they were not Australian, but Swedish). (posted after edit conflict) —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 03:39, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Swedish: sh and oo 

message: When did anyone pronounce the word that as lat? I think this is incorrect because it doesn't make sense and might be like one person in the entire word that does this. -Iopq 12:13, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, I took it out.  The only times that would happen would be when next to an /l/ in fast speech and in general phonetic mishaps.  In both senses, Russian speakers are no more likely to do it than anyone else.AEuSoes1 22:00, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Russian 

message: I would like to propose a reverse version this article, such as “Anglophone pronunciation of foreign languages”. It will go something like 
:French
:*No nasal or guttural sounds, i.e. un, goes like /ʌn/ rather then /ɶ/
:*Mix-up of the pronunciation of “j” and “g”, gîte, should be pronounce /ʒit/ ends up being pronounce /gɪt/
159753 18:17, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Don't let me be the one to stop you.  Although keep in mind that the different dialects of English will cause different negative transfers. AEuSoes1 22:16, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  A reverse version of this article 

message: An anon added a "move to Wikibooks" template, giving no reason. I thought simply removing it would be rude, so instead I'll ask if anyone supports such a move. I think it's a fine encyclopedia article. —Keenan Pepper 04:24, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: According to the "what is wikibooks" link, wikibooks includes instructional resources.  There is a misconception that this page is either a) a guide to non-native english speakers in correcting their speech or b) a guide to native speakers in identifying foreign accents.  This page is neither, it simply explains (in linguistic terms) foreign accents that people hear. AEuSoes1 19:43, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I totally agree, and I'm going to remove the template. —Keenan Pepper 00:01, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Suggested move to Wikibooks 

message: The section about Hungarian seems to at least partially contradict the article about final devoicing. 
Compare:
*Hungarian speakers are likely to exhibit regressive voicing assimilation, even across word boundaries. So, for instance, "truck driver" sounds more like "trugg driver" and "red house" like "ret house." (Non-native pronunciations of English#Hungarian)
*English does not have phonological final devoicing of the type that neutralizes phonemic contrasts; thus pairs like bad and bat are distinct in all major accents of English. Nevertheless voiced obstruents are devoiced to some extent in final position in English, especially when phrase-final or when followed by a voiceless consonant (for example, bad cat ). The most salient distinction between bad and bat is not the voicing of the final consonant… (Final devoicing: As I understand it, this means that even native speakers of English may exhibit some degree of regressive voicing assimilation /devoicing/ across word boundaries.)
:::You kind of miss the point.  English speakers still contrast the two phonemic differences (albeit with vowel length and glottalization) while Hungarian speakers may not. AEuSoes1 11:44, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The lack of glottal or glottalized stops as allophones of word final /t/ is already mentioned @ the 3rd bullet point. (And as I understand it, this feature is "responsible" for the loss of contrast – not voicing. Vowel length is very often phonemic in Hungarian, so this distinction might be retained, but I'm not a linguist, so I'd rather not speculate about this.) --194.152.154.2 18:49, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Voicing assimilation 

message: The dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/ may be replaced by dental sibilents  and .
:The voiced dental fricative is more often replaced by a (laminal dental) plosive (). 
:Quote: The most acceptable substitutes in the local cultural tradition are  -> 'sz',  -> 'd'. (Ádám Nádasdy: Background to English Pronunciation (Phonetics, Phonology, Spelling) – for students of English at Hungarian teacher training institutions; note that <sz> is a spelling for  in Hungarian) I haven't read this book myself, but an English teacher(?) cited it in a debate about this question @ HuWP.  --194.152.154.2 03:37, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, go ahead and make the appropriate changes to the article and then please add that book as a source.  We need as many of those as possible. AEuSoes1 11:44, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Ok, but I think it's better to cite it as a reference, not a source for the whole section. (I'm not sure that it would support all other statements in this section, eg. maybe schwas are more often replaced by ø-s than œ-s as the latter is not a phoneme of Hungarian. But again, as a non-linguist I'd rather refrain from speculations.) --194.152.154.2 17:48, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dental fricatives 

message: Most speakers have an absence of the English tonal variation. Falling intonation is used, making questions sound like statements.
:I don't know who was the one who said this to you but I seriously doubt that the second sentence is true. In fact it's very easy to construct many example sentences in Hungarian that are identical in almost every aspect but the intonation.  
:Eg. "Tudod milyenek a szülei." [statement, falling intonation is used] (lit trnsl.: You know his parents.; meaning: You knowthat his parents are stupid.)
: "Tudod milyenek a szülei?" [question, rising intonation is used] (lit trnsl.: Do you know his parents?; meaning: Do you know how stupid his parents are?) --Adolar von Csobánka (Talk) 19:41, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Falling intonation 

message: I just tagged this article as being too long. This talk page is also too long according to above. Voortle 01:19, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. The talk page is very long in my opinion too. If the main article must be subdivided, my two ideas are split them up either alphabetically or by language group. Which would be better? 67.10.111.125 20:22, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I think alphabetically would be best. Voortle 02:44, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

text: I disagree with subdividing it.  We could probably combine similar languages into one group, like Ukrainian and Russian.  Differences between the two can still be emphasized in the same way as dialectal differences within a language are.  AEuSoes1 20:49, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Length of the article

message: The common Canadian French dialect of joile can be so far removed from "proper" French, that the two become mutually unintelligible and can almost be considered different languages. As such, I believe that French Canadian deserves it's own distinct subsection under French. 
There are roughly 7 million native French Canadians sandwiched between 300 million English North Americans. This has led to some uniquely Québecois errors in speaking English. The article currently mentions one of those differences, but there are others. In fact, French Canadian (Québecois) pronunciation of English is often starkly different than what you will hear in France. I am not qualified to make any changes however. If anyone is, feel free. :) --70.82.50.67 08:36, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: French Canadian