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It always puzzles me how little knowledge of foreign languages the average English native speaker has. Every time I hear an English speaker trying to pronounce

It always puzzles me how little knowledge of foreign languages the average English native speaker has. Every time I hear an English speaker trying to pronounce Italian or Spanish words it generally ends up in a complete disaster (especially Italian). For instance, lots of folks haven't realized that the Great Vowel Shift happened, and so try to pronounce vowels as in English, without realizing that 99% of cases, that's wrong. Also, English speakers have an incredibly hard time not only pronouncing but even understanding the whole concept of geminated consonants, which makes them funnily destroy Italian or Japanese names (gemination is especially important for Italian, where certain words are otherwise undistinguishable, se calo/callo, casa/cassa, pala/palla, ..).

dkdbejwi383 5y ago
I’d be interested in some examples for both, if you could! I’m a stupid/ignorant English speaker, because I only know English and German so can’t pronounce Italian intuitively.
- qalmakka 5y ago
  Italian is somewhat simple to pronounce (probably it is not, but I like believing that). - The cardinal rule is that EVERY SINGLE LETTER MUST BE READ. We don't write unnecessary stuff, we don't eat letters like in French. - The only exception is the letter h, which we use sparingly by itself as a Latin leftover, and is ALWAYS silent. Like "ho" and "o" sound the same. - there are only 7 vowels (English has around 16? 17?), and no "weird" consonants. - E and O have two allophones, but everyone in Italy has a different accent so it's quite irrelevant how you pronounce them as long as it's a "boring" E and O, like in the English "eh". The O sound is especially difficult for English speakers, because O is almost always pronounced like "ou" /oʊ/. Just try to drop the /ʊ/ part. Italian vowels are boring and plain. They don't sound fancy or complicated. They are barebones and flat. - In general, 1 letter = 1 sound. This is quite a hard rule, and it's rarely broken. - There's a few gotchas to this, like [gn] and [gl] which sound like the Spanish [ñ] and [ll] respectively¹. - [gh] is always a hard g, like in English "get". [gi] and [ge] are _always_ soft Gs, like the one in the English word "justice". The same applies to [c]: [ch] is hard (read it as k), [ci]/[ce] are like in "cherry". - [l] is never dark, while in English it often is. L in Italian always sounds the same, /l/, as in "litter". - Syllables are not as stressed as in English. English has this tendency to "squish" one part of a word together and then slow down at the end. Italian usually has a quite "constant" tempo, with a bigger emphasis on the "accent", which is a stress put on a specific syllable. The biggest hurdle IMHO for English speakers are geminated sounds (i.e. double letters), which do not exist _at all_ AFAIK in English, and that are often fundamental to distinguish words in Italian. It's something conceptually similar to what Japanese go through when they learn English and discover that so many words require a distinction between /r/ and /l/, like right and light. For instance, "pollo" means chicken, while "polo" is pole. An English speaker will usually pronounce them the same. It's also important to remember that English went through the Great Vowel Shift, so it's whole alphabet is now way more messed up compared to basically every other language that uses the Latin alphabet. Also, the Latin alphabet was designed around the phonology of Latin, so it's very good at representing Italian phonetically, while quite bad to represent Germanic languages (way too many vowels). Given that you know German, you can use the German reading of vowel letters with Italian, and it would probably work better than the English one. German also has lots of vowels, but they tend to write them closer to how Romance languages do (so A is /a/, e is /e/, ...) ¹ [gl] sounds /ʎ/ only when followed by i, like in "sceglie". Otherwise, it sounds like /gl/ like in English "glue"
  - dkdbejwi383 5y ago
    There are some geminated sounds in English, mostly in compounds e.g. "roommate", "midday", "misspell".
    - qalmakka 5y ago
      That's right, I had never realized those existed. They could be a good way to teach people how to pronounce geminated sounds.
edanm 5y ago
You're making some very broad generalizations, which is why you are puzzled IMO. Firstly, "English speakers" includes many people who speak multiple languages. Technically, English speakers also includes people who are non-native English speakers, who by definition know another language. Secondly, there are many native English speakers who speak a second language, or who are at least exposed enough to second languages to know how they sound. For example, many states in the United States have a very large Hispanic population, parts of Canada have people who speak both English and French, many people from England speak second languages (French is fairly common if I recall correctly). I think who you're thinking of are only the native English-speaking people who are not much exposed to other languages. There is a fairly large population of these, because the United States is fairly large and has lots of areas that are surrounded by only English speakers (as opposed to most other countries in the world, whose neighbors speak another language). Of course if you're only looking at the subset of people who aren't exposed to another language, you'd expect to see them have little knowledge of foreign languages! (Side note: I wonder if even this phenomenon is decreasing, given greater immigration, the Internet, foreign TV/Movies being more available/popular, etc.)
- wink 5y ago
  In my (limited) experience there is no discernible difference between Americans and British people mispronouncing Italian (or German, for that matter) and to a degree Spanish words. I think this is what the parent poster meant. If your native language is English AND you don't know any others, then your mispronunciations will be similar.
  - qalmakka 5y ago
    This, exactly. I also saw a quite big difference between monolingual English speakers and Italian speakers. The average monolingual Italian speaker that has had a basic exposure to certain English words through TV or media in general WILL definitely mispronounce the words, but the result is never so corrupted and garbled to result incomprehensible to an English speaker. For instance, the average Italian might pronounce a word like "cocktail" as /ˈkoktɛl/ instead of the correct English /ˈkɒkteɪl/, or "underground" as /andɛrˈgraund/ instead of /ʌndəˈɡɹaʊnd/; I've yet to find an English speaker that hasn't studied Italian that doesn't do butcherings like /ʃəˈbɑːda/, which an Italian won't definitely recognize as "ciabatta" due to the fact that it is supposed to sound /tʃaˈbatta/. I think it's a process somewhat similar to how Japanese corrupts loanwords, but in the other direction: English has a vastly larger array of sounds compared to Italian, so speakers somewhat fail to understand that Romance languages (except French and friends, but we don't talk about French) are usually much "flatter" in sound than your average Germanic language with 16 vowels.
mmarq 5y ago
I find it very annoying when Italian speakers pronounce foreign names using sounds that do not exist in Italian. Pronouncing “Merkel” as a German would, makes it impossible to write and unrecognisable to 99% of Italian speakers. It is not reasonable to expect people to be able to pronounce and process sounds from all languages. It doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t even try, but if your name is “ Friedrich” you should accept that it’s unpronounceable for an Italian and that “fredrik” is probably good enough. Likewise I don’t expect English speakers to pronounce my name correctly (they never will), and I’m sure I don’t pronounce theirs as a native speaker would. As a side note, I find it funny that the English seem to enjoy pronouncing guttural Rs and nasal sounds when they say French names. The English love saying “Macron” (usually producing the sound of a lung exploding and being expelled through their nose), while they don’t mind vandalising Italian or Spanish names.
- qalmakka 5y ago
  > if your name is “ Friedrich” you should accept that it’s unpronounceable for an Italian and that “fredrik” I think that the only unpronounceable things in "Freidrich" for an Italian speaker are the guttural Rs and the /ç/ sound at the end. Most Italians are acquainted to the fact that 'ei' is /ai/ in German thank to South Tyrol and names such as "Einstein" being common knowledge - nobody would ever pronounce it /'einstein/. Thus an Italian would probably not mind pronouncing it as /fraidrik/, with a rolled R (which isn't technically incorrect in German, AFAIK) and a /k/ sound in place of /ç/.
  - jagger27 5y ago
    I think people really overdo the idea that certain sounds simply cannot be replicated by non-native speakers. If there is any remote proximity to native speakers and a bare minimum effort is made to practice tricky sounds, it's totally doable. I certainly picked up French quite easily in school. Later, in university, I picked up Italian very easily (though I had some exposure from older relatives). More recently, I absorbed a tiny bit of "hey how are you" Mandarin from coworkers, who were surprised at my ability to accurately parrot some words after a little bit of practice.

dkdbejwi383 5y ago

I’d be interested in some examples for both, if you could! I’m a stupid/ignorant English speaker, because I only know English and German so can’t pronounce Italian intuitively.

qalmakka 5y ago
Italian is somewhat simple to pronounce (probably it is not, but I like believing that). - The cardinal rule is that EVERY SINGLE LETTER MUST BE READ. We don't write unnecessary stuff, we don't eat letters like in French. - The only exception is the letter h, which we use sparingly by itself as a Latin leftover, and is ALWAYS silent. Like "ho" and "o" sound the same. - there are only 7 vowels (English has around 16? 17?), and no "weird" consonants. - E and O have two allophones, but everyone in Italy has a different accent so it's quite irrelevant how you pronounce them as long as it's a "boring" E and O, like in the English "eh". The O sound is especially difficult for English speakers, because O is almost always pronounced like "ou" /oʊ/. Just try to drop the /ʊ/ part. Italian vowels are boring and plain. They don't sound fancy or complicated. They are barebones and flat. - In general, 1 letter = 1 sound. This is quite a hard rule, and it's rarely broken. - There's a few gotchas to this, like [gn] and [gl] which sound like the Spanish [ñ] and [ll] respectively¹. - [gh] is always a hard g, like in English "get". [gi] and [ge] are _always_ soft Gs, like the one in the English word "justice". The same applies to [c]: [ch] is hard (read it as k), [ci]/[ce] are like in "cherry". - [l] is never dark, while in English it often is. L in Italian always sounds the same, /l/, as in "litter". - Syllables are not as stressed as in English. English has this tendency to "squish" one part of a word together and then slow down at the end. Italian usually has a quite "constant" tempo, with a bigger emphasis on the "accent", which is a stress put on a specific syllable. The biggest hurdle IMHO for English speakers are geminated sounds (i.e. double letters), which do not exist _at all_ AFAIK in English, and that are often fundamental to distinguish words in Italian. It's something conceptually similar to what Japanese go through when they learn English and discover that so many words require a distinction between /r/ and /l/, like right and light. For instance, "pollo" means chicken, while "polo" is pole. An English speaker will usually pronounce them the same. It's also important to remember that English went through the Great Vowel Shift, so it's whole alphabet is now way more messed up compared to basically every other language that uses the Latin alphabet. Also, the Latin alphabet was designed around the phonology of Latin, so it's very good at representing Italian phonetically, while quite bad to represent Germanic languages (way too many vowels). Given that you know German, you can use the German reading of vowel letters with Italian, and it would probably work better than the English one. German also has lots of vowels, but they tend to write them closer to how Romance languages do (so A is /a/, e is /e/, ...) ¹ [gl] sounds /ʎ/ only when followed by i, like in "sceglie". Otherwise, it sounds like /gl/ like in English "glue"
- dkdbejwi383 5y ago
  There are some geminated sounds in English, mostly in compounds e.g. "roommate", "midday", "misspell".
  - qalmakka 5y ago
    That's right, I had never realized those existed. They could be a good way to teach people how to pronounce geminated sounds.

edanm 5y ago

You're making some very broad generalizations, which is why you are puzzled IMO. Firstly, "English speakers" includes many people who speak multiple languages. Technically, English speakers also includes people who are non-native English speakers, who by definition know another language. Secondly, there are many native English speakers who speak a second language, or who are at least exposed enough to second languages to know how they sound. For example, many states in the United States have a very large Hispanic population, parts of Canada have people who speak both English and French, many people from England speak second languages (French is fairly common if I recall correctly). I think who you're thinking of are only the native English-speaking people who are not much exposed to other languages. There is a fairly large population of these, because the United States is fairly large and has lots of areas that are surrounded by only English speakers (as opposed to most other countries in the world, whose neighbors speak another language). Of course if you're only looking at the subset of people who aren't exposed to another language, you'd expect to see them have little knowledge of foreign languages! (Side note: I wonder if even this phenomenon is decreasing, given greater immigration, the Internet, foreign TV/Movies being more available/popular, etc.)

wink 5y ago
In my (limited) experience there is no discernible difference between Americans and British people mispronouncing Italian (or German, for that matter) and to a degree Spanish words. I think this is what the parent poster meant. If your native language is English AND you don't know any others, then your mispronunciations will be similar.
- qalmakka 5y ago
  This, exactly. I also saw a quite big difference between monolingual English speakers and Italian speakers. The average monolingual Italian speaker that has had a basic exposure to certain English words through TV or media in general WILL definitely mispronounce the words, but the result is never so corrupted and garbled to result incomprehensible to an English speaker. For instance, the average Italian might pronounce a word like "cocktail" as /ˈkoktɛl/ instead of the correct English /ˈkɒkteɪl/, or "underground" as /andɛrˈgraund/ instead of /ʌndəˈɡɹaʊnd/; I've yet to find an English speaker that hasn't studied Italian that doesn't do butcherings like /ʃəˈbɑːda/, which an Italian won't definitely recognize as "ciabatta" due to the fact that it is supposed to sound /tʃaˈbatta/. I think it's a process somewhat similar to how Japanese corrupts loanwords, but in the other direction: English has a vastly larger array of sounds compared to Italian, so speakers somewhat fail to understand that Romance languages (except French and friends, but we don't talk about French) are usually much "flatter" in sound than your average Germanic language with 16 vowels.

mmarq 5y ago

I find it very annoying when Italian speakers pronounce foreign names using sounds that do not exist in Italian. Pronouncing “Merkel” as a German would, makes it impossible to write and unrecognisable to 99% of Italian speakers. It is not reasonable to expect people to be able to pronounce and process sounds from all languages. It doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t even try, but if your name is “ Friedrich” you should accept that it’s unpronounceable for an Italian and that “fredrik” is probably good enough. Likewise I don’t expect English speakers to pronounce my name correctly (they never will), and I’m sure I don’t pronounce theirs as a native speaker would. As a side note, I find it funny that the English seem to enjoy pronouncing guttural Rs and nasal sounds when they say French names. The English love saying “Macron” (usually producing the sound of a lung exploding and being expelled through their nose), while they don’t mind vandalising Italian or Spanish names.

qalmakka 5y ago
> if your name is “ Friedrich” you should accept that it’s unpronounceable for an Italian and that “fredrik” I think that the only unpronounceable things in "Freidrich" for an Italian speaker are the guttural Rs and the /ç/ sound at the end. Most Italians are acquainted to the fact that 'ei' is /ai/ in German thank to South Tyrol and names such as "Einstein" being common knowledge - nobody would ever pronounce it /'einstein/. Thus an Italian would probably not mind pronouncing it as /fraidrik/, with a rolled R (which isn't technically incorrect in German, AFAIK) and a /k/ sound in place of /ç/.
- jagger27 5y ago
  I think people really overdo the idea that certain sounds simply cannot be replicated by non-native speakers. If there is any remote proximity to native speakers and a bare minimum effort is made to practice tricky sounds, it's totally doable. I certainly picked up French quite easily in school. Later, in university, I picked up Italian very easily (though I had some exposure from older relatives). More recently, I absorbed a tiny bit of "hey how are you" Mandarin from coworkers, who were surprised at my ability to accurately parrot some words after a little bit of practice.