Talk:Anglophone pronunciation of foreign languages

message: I think you have a problem here. Tuli is pronuced TOO-li, tulli is TOOL-li and tuuli is TOOOO-li, I should know as I am learning the language.  159753 09:30, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure what you're getting at.  The only difference that I made in the pronunciations from what you put was that I decided not to split up the geminated /l/ with a stress mark.  But since we're talking about Finnish, the phrases hyvää päivää, nimeni on Jaakko and terve, nime on Jaakko should be translated in the article. AEuSoes1 09:45, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: In Finnish, you generally don't pronounce double consonants, except when it is a suffix like -ssa/-ssä (in) or -lla/-llä (on). Thus each consonant is pronounced separately, kuka (how) is pronounced ku-ka, but kukka (flower) is pronounced kuk-ka. Hyvää päivää, nimeni on Jaakko means “hello, my name is Jaakko" (the Finnish version of James).  159753 10:06, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  This is made up. Finnish always distinguishes between double consonants. It's English that ignores them. Ironically, it's exactly the '-lla' and '-ssa' where certain dialects (Satakunta etc.) ignore the difference (e.g. metsäsä instead of metsässä "in the forest"). Also, "kukka" is pronounced with a lengthened 'k', not two short 'k' 's. The same is true for other stops, that is, 't' and 'p'. The difference of long and short sounds remains phonemic, e.g. tapan sinut huomenna "I will kill you tomorrow" vs. tapaan sinut huomenna "I will meet you tomorrow" --Vuo (talk) 20:11, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

text: According to the Finnish phonology page, nearly every consonant has some sort of doubled form.  I still don't get what your grievance is. AEuSoes1 22:44, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Finnish tuli/tulli 

message: In the section on Finnish, what does that distinction between accusative and dative mean? As far as I know Finnish does not have dative case. Did the writer mean the distinction between accusative and partitive or something else? Ossi 10:13, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Accusative vs. Dative 

message: It says in the article that "In unstressed syllables, English speakers are very likely to merge  and  to : pintar  becomes .Would this result in two otherwise distinct Spanish words sounding the same? Although I have taken three or four years of Spanish (depending on what you go by--I took Spanish in seventh and eighth grade, which is the first and second half of first-year Spanish respectively), nothing comes to immediate mind about when this would be a major problem. --67.10.111.125 22:08, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, it would create mergers.  I never noticed it myself, but it makes a bit of sense.  If it's too objectionable, we can either take it out or alter the language to make its tendency not so strong. AEuSoes1 03:58, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If you can come up with a merger, put it and translate the words. [Edit at 23:42, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spanish question 

message: I removed the statement that " final 'e' is always silent in Portuguese  " because that is obviously not true. Final 'e' is pronounced as  in Brazilian Portuguese and  in European Portuguese. I also added a reference to the difficulty Anglophones have with Portuguese nasal vowels. 201.52.32.9 00:16, 6 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Portuguese 

message: I changed the gender/number/case agreement example "the green flowers" (Sp. las flores verdes, Port. as flores verdes, German die grüne Blumen/ den grünen Blumen, French les fleurs vertes) to "the red flowers" ((Sp. las flores rojas, Port. as flores vermelhas, German die roten Blumen/ den roten Blumen, French les fleurs rouges). The reason for the change is that flowers are not usually green, but rather red, yellow, white etc. Please do not change back.
200.177.30.226 10:32, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I opposed an earlier change because I rather like using the same examples for multiple languages.  Changing all of them is fine.  AEuSoes1 11:41, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Flowers 

message: On the Esperanto pieces, although I don't speak the language, I do know about how a beginner may make mistakes. 
Firstly, one can get muddled especially on the <g>, <ĝ>, and <ĵ>. Take the word, “ĝangalo” meaning jungle, the ĝ is pronounced like a soft j sound and one can forget that there is a circumflex over the first g so one could pronounce it like “gan'galo” rather then “jan'galo”. 
On the diphthong <eŭ>, you wrote about about <eu> which isn't an diphthong at all, an Esperanist would say the letters separately. Also, the sound comes from Belarussian, an anglophone would not have used it.  
However, we both recognized that the letters <ĥ> and <c> would have problems, as they both have sounds that English doesn't use. The letter sound [ts] isn't used, I have used the symbol [ʦ] as it more widely known. 159753 16:51, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Since there are no native speakers of Esperanto, there should not be a section on that pseudo-language in this article  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.225.170.9 (talk) 05:24, 9 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Native Esperanto speakers appears to disagree with you. Double sharp (talk) 13:08, 30 December 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Esperanto is of marginal importance. Also while some people do speak Esperanto as a mother tongue, it is usually the language of home, not the wider community they live in everyday (outside conventions). Many of the other Esperanto speakers they are exposed to are non-native which is also significant and puts it in a similar bracket to Neo-Hebrew, Cornish and other revived languages.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.249.184.248 (talk) 09:31, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Esperanto 

message: I removed the following since it is factually not correct
----
*The word de means both the partitive, (some/any) and the preposition, (from/to); however, it inflects differently depends on which one. Du, de la, de l'  and des for the partitve and du/de, de, d'  and des for the preposition.   
----
The forms given for the partitive are correct for affirmative contexts, but wrong in negated contexts (pas de (*la) soupe). The forms given for the preposition are correct when used with proper nouns, but not with common nouns e.g. je viens de *(la) forêt. This is not to say that speakers of English would not have problems with them. 
Furthermore, the use of 'inflected' in this context is unfortunate, since de la is clearly not a case of inflection, consisting of two phonological words.
Jasy jatere 09:34, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  removed bullet point 

message: I've marked the statement Tendency to pronounce unstressed vowels as a schwa ([ə]). This leads for instance to le (masculine definite article) and la (feminine definite article) being pronounced the same as dubious. While I don't really have much of a problem with the first part, I've never heard an English L1 speaker realize la as [lə]. If they do say [lə] for la, I would argue that it's more because of a gender misassignment and in their head their thinking le, than the former opinion. If the article's opinion were true, we would expect the rendering of the Spanish la to be [lə] in unstressed situations as well, and through years of Spanish classes with English students, I can attest that's just not true.--el Aprel (facta-facienda) 04:50, 9 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Definite articles in French 

message: I have removed all items that don't have to do with pronunciation.  I suppose now I will be deluged with attacks for having ignored the talk page, etc.  I personally do not see anything debatable about the fact that an article entitled "Anglophone pronunciation of foreign languages" can only have pronunciation items in it.  It is a waste of time to "debate" something like this.  The deleted material is presumably good, valid material and has a place on Wikipedia.  Please put it somewhere else and stop bickering.  Thank you. Troglo (talk) 19:27, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I think in the past I've argued against this sort of thing, but considering the whole page is unsourced anyway I wouldn't be surprised if these are wholly untrue in the first place.  — Æµ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 20:04, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Non-pronunciation items 

message: The article contains this statement - "They also may voice s if it appears between vowels, such as rosa ('pink') as [ˈɹo.zɑ]; while this would be correct in Italian, s is never voiced in Spanish." If we're going for accuracy, then this would be incorrect. Between vowels it certainly is not /z/ but before any other voiced consonant /d/, /b/, /g/, /l/, /m/, /n/, /r/, ect... it is voiced ([z]). Perhaps we don't need any detail on these specifics in this kind of an article, but I personally believe that we should avoid blatant lies to children. I propose at least changing it to say that there are cases, but it's generally not where an anglophone thinks it is... or something. I don't really know. I'm brand new to this but just spotted a mistake and thought I'd let it be known.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Drizzitdudden (talk • contribs) 11:15, 23 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: This article is about the ways English speakers pronounce other languages.  The statement isn't saying that Spanish /s/ is voiced between vowels but that English speakers may incorrectly do this when speaking Spanish.  Most of this article is unsourced, which is problematic.  — Æµ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 18:44, 23 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Voiced "s" in Spanish 

message: "The French rhotic is trilled and usually a uvular /ʁ/; English-speakers tend to use the approximant [ɹ]."
I don't understand - surely /ʁ/ is by definition not trilled? Lfh (talk) 13:56, 27 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  French rhotic 

message: English speakers tend to butcher things like "voulez-vous" by rhyming "voulez" with "lay", when the vowel sound should really be more like the "ea" in "idea".  I have no idea how to phrase this properly though, so I'm just adding it here in the discussion. /85.229.218.226 (talk) 19:16, 7 March 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure what you're getting at, but the <-lez> in "voulez" certainly does not sound like the <ea> in English "idea". Frerin (talk) 00:32, 5 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  French words ending with "-lez" 

message: The most common reason for me being annoyed on Anglophone pronunciation is Latin. Mostly because Anglophones tend to believe either that Latin is English, or that the English so called pronunciation of Latin is the original one. F.ex. the constellations. ... said: Rursus (mbork³) 12:34, 1 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I believe we have an article about the pronunciation of Latin words in English.  I don't remember the title of it.  — Æµ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 20:29, 1 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Traditional English pronunciation of Latin? Double sharp (talk) 13:07, 30 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Deep, deep need (!!<big>!</big>)

message: 1. /a/ will sometimes become /æ/ (example: word "uraditi"(/uraditi/)will become /uɹæ:dıtı/
2. /v/ will become /w/
3. /ʥ/ will become /d͡ʒ/
4. sometimes /i/ will become /ı/
4. sometimes /l/ will become /w/
5. sometimes /ɲ/ will become /nj/ or /n/
6. sometimes /ʎ/ will become /lj/, /w/ or /l/
7. rhotic /r/ will become non-rhotic
8. /ʨ/ will become /t͡ʃ /
and so on...  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.87.248.174 (talk) 16:09, 22 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Anglophones are common on Serbian television? —Tamfang (talk) 01:33, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Anglophone pronounication of Serbian in Serbian TV-shows 

message: Eh?  German /a/ is very similar to what in north/mid England?  Which dialects pronunciation of 'hut' is closest? —Tamfang (talk) 05:52, 28 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  German /a/ 

message: English speakers often struggle with the velar fricative in other languages along with other guttural sounds such as in Arabic, and the Welsh "ll".
English speakers sometimes substitute this sound with a "k" sound e.g. "lock" for the Gaelic "loch", or for "h" especially when it comes at the beginning of words - so Javier in Spanish comes out as "Havier".
Also this article has too much info on Esperanto, a language of marginal importance, and not enough on certain major European languages many English speakers learn. 
Other traits - you might want to find ref.s for these (mostly my experience but I believe these to be factual)
* German "s" often pronounced the same way as English. Native speakers of German pronounce it more like the English "z".
* "Z" in German and Italian, pronounced as in English, when it is more of a "ts" sound.
* French "j" and Russian "zh" pronounced like English "j" rather than a "dzh" sound.
* Welsh "ll" pronounced like English "l" or "hl".
* French and Portuguese vowels denasalised.
* Dutch "g" pronounced as English "g".
* The distinctive "d" and "t" sounds in Hindustani languages merged into the English sounds.
* Failure to distinguish between soft and hard consonants in many languages including Russian.
* Trouble with guttural sounds and glottal stops of Semitic languages.
* Introducing English stress patterns into Japanese.
The article mentions Mandarin, but not Cantonese, a language which has had long term contact with English, especially in Hong Kong.
-109.249.184.248 (talk) 09:27, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Those are interesting points, but we would need sources to back up claims we make in the article. — Æµ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 18:25, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Velar fricative etc