Pronounce Nikon

cooltouch said:

I have never cared for the term "guttural" when it is used to describe German. This description is employed, I believe, because of a single consonant found in German that doesn't exist in English -- the velar fricative /ch/, as is found in the German word for the pronoun 'I' -- 'Ich'. JFK's famous quote, "Ich bin ein Berliner" shows it in use. Anyway, I don't consider it appropriate to characterize an entire language as "guttural" because of a single consonant. Besides! In some dialects, the /ch/ isn't even pronounced. It has become the /sh/ fricative, softening the overall sound of speech considerably.

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So how do you pronounce loch as in Loch Ness?

I think that word could be said to be part of the English language though of Scottish origin.

Ronnie

anfenglin said:

Now, I don't know how your daughter's teachers did things, maybe they tried to teach her the most used 2 or 3000 by just giving them to her with the order to learn them by heart, that certainly is the wrong method.
It takes time to fully grasp the system of the characters, but as I keep telling people (provided they ask), chinese characters follow a simple system of parts, they are like a construction kit, once you've grasped how they work,
learning them is just a matter of studying.

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Yes, I'm familiar with the general way in which the characters are taught. In Japanese, kanji are taught much the same way, with the most basic characters being the first that are introduced, but also with radicals being introduced early on.

I don't recall anymore what characters that school was trying to teach my daughter. Where they and I got crosswise was I wanted my daughter to learn how to speak the language first the way Chinese children acquire their language before any written instruction takes place. But these people insisted on teaching the written language along with a minimal amount of spoken language instruction. Honestly, their primary emphasis was on teaching these young kids how to write in a language they couldn't really even speak yet. My daughter got so frustrated she refused to attend the classes any longer. So with pleasure I withdrew her from the program.

mooseontheloose said:

Luckily at work there's a French guy who always talks to me in French, so I'm slowly getting my head around it again, but Japanese often gets mixed in (and English) so I would imagine it would be quite confusing to anyone listening to our conversation. However, having grown up in a bilingual home with lots of "Frenglish" being spoken, I have no problems with code-switching.

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Ah yes -- code switching. Very common in conversation among bilinguals. I find it amusing listening to people code switch between English and another language. Assuming this other language is their primary one, I find it interesting which English terms are used. Usually they're common ones that are frequently heard in English conversations.

And I understand about substitution of terms when using another language. I learned German in high school and I'm not fluent. Often when I try to speak it, I find myself substituting Japanese terms to, essentially, fill in the blanks. Same thing happens when I try to speak Chinese.

ronnies said:

So how do you pronounce loch as in Loch Ness?

I think that word could be said to be part of the English language though of Scottish origin.

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Yes, it's part of the English language, much the way chaise lounge is. That is, it's a borrow word from Scottish, which is a Gaelic language. But from what I understand, the pronunciation is a holdover in Scottish from Old English, where it was common. 'Loch' means "lake" and yes, I pronounce it correctly, but that is because 1) I'm a linguist and 2) I had German in high school and I'm familiar with the /ch/ voiceless velar fricative.

I would suspect, however, that most Americans pronounce it as 'lock', just as they would pronounce the 18th century composer, Johann Sebastian Bach's last name as 'bahk' instead of the proper way.

- JFK's famous quote, "Ich bin ein Berliner" -

I heard a funny take on that event, that at the time the President made this speech; a ''Berliner'' was a common reference to a sort of doughnut or bagel type delicacy popular in Europe at the time.

JP

It's not only Nikon. I've heard many versions of Mamiya. When I worked for Olympus they pronounced Olympus as Oh-rimp-us, and every first Tuesday in November was "erection day".

Skiver101 said:

- JFK's famous quote, "Ich bin ein Berliner" -

I heard a funny take on that event, that at the time the President made this speech; a ''Berliner'' was a common reference to a sort of doughnut or bagel type delicacy popular in Europe at the time.

JP

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They still exist

We also did switching in China, we started including Chinese words in our German or English, some Chinese words just were more fitting for the thing we wanted to say like "mafan" 麻烦，which roughly means inconvenient, troublesome. The Chinese seemed to fit better at the time.

cooltouch said:

Ah yes -- code switching. Very common in conversation among bilinguals. I find it amusing listening to people code switch between English and another language. Assuming this other language is their primary one, I find it interesting which English terms are used. Usually they're common ones that are frequently heard in English conversations.

And I understand about substitution of terms when using another language. I learned German in high school and I'm not fluent. Often when I try to speak it, I find myself substituting Japanese terms to, essentially, fill in the blanks. Same thing happens when I try to speak Chinese.

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I seem to recall research saying that children who code switch are just using the first word that comes to mind, which is often in the language they learned the word first. However, I notice with my parents that they use really random words like "I saw le chien over there" with no rhyme or reason for the switch. As for understanding code-switching, my best friend in high school was pretty good at French, but one time she came on a small road trip with me and my parents and some of their French-speaking friends, and she was totally confused by the language mash-up being spoken - it was really hard for her to follow. However here in Japan it's pretty commonly used, especially since so many English words (and Japanese English words, which only Japanese understand and may not realise that English-speakers don't know what they are talking about) are used now. Even I mix in Japanese when speaking to students sometime, but I do it on purpose, not naturally.

Some examples of Japanese English:
-paper driver: someone with a license, but doesn't have or drive a car regularly
-barcode: a man's combover (this is my favourite)
-CM - commercial
-CA - cabin attendant
-make - make-up
-live - a live concert (I keep telling them it's an adjective, not a noun)
-pasokon - personal computer (no one uses "PC")
-Viking (sounds more like biking, since they can't pronounce the "v") - a buffet-style restaurant, often yaki-niku (grilled meats)

Sirius Glass said:

Speaking of German pronunciation. In European movies and television Germans are quite capable of speaking any other language perfectly without any sign of a German accent.

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You yet did not hear ME speaking English...

In American made movies and television, such as Stalag 13, The Dirty Dozen, and The Longest Day, Germans speak with a very heavy guttural German accent. I have never understood this. Please help me by explaining this.

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Yes, I realized that too. I mean not only in scenes where a German is depicted as speaking English, where such still would be acceptible, but also in a scene where Germans are speakingh German with each, but the whole scene is filmed in English. Here one would expect a plain, non-accent English. However quite often movie makers employ an accent to indicate that actually foreigners (for the audience) are speaking, nonwithstanding the actual situation within that movie.

anfenglin said:

Additionally, being German means having the German nationality first, adapting to cultural conventions second. There are so many regional differences in Germany that a Bavarian and a Hanseatic person have the same problems conversing properly, in the rural areas it is even more separated into small language groups. People from a village 20km away have a slightly different accent and some even have other rites.
Also, adding the 40 year separation of Germany, there is an even bigger difference between Germans from east to west, although that is slowly starting to dissolve.

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Still the variation is not that strong that I as German have real trouble understanding someone from another part of Germany even if he would be speaking dialect. I find the situation in small Flanders much more difficult between dialects.

In Germany in general a kind of equilisation has established after WWII. Part of the reason (in contrast to neighbouring countries) likely are the millions of german refugees that mingled with the indegenious population.
Anyway, where I live I never heard anyone speak local dialect in public!

Sirius Glass said:

"guttural" sounds are sounds from low in the throat. If you did not hear guttural sounds when your were very young [a baby] you will never really be able to say them correctly. I lost my ability to make proper guttural sounds when I had throat surgery to widen my throat.

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I disagree with this on a couple of points. As I mentioned in a previous post, all developmentally normal children pass through what I call a "language acquisition window," which lasts until puberty. If the child acquires a second (or third or fourth, etc) language prior to this change-of-life event, they will speak and understand it like a native -- or so close to it that it'll fool most people. There is an earlier stage that occurs during a child's second or third year of life, in which they acquire their primary language. This is called the Language Acquisition Stage. It is a very brief, but crucially influential period, lasting only about six months. When the child exits it, they can speak their primary language with a fully recursed grammar and a rapidly growing vocabulary. The Language Acquisition Window, by contrast, doesn't have any sort of hard exit point, and an additional language can often be acquired in less time than the primary language. I submit that any pre-pubescent child who is exposed to any language, such that the child is in an environment where it is commonly spoken, can acquire this language in a similar fashion by which the primary language was acquired. That is, no schooling is necessary. Only a language environment where the language is practiced.

Secondly, any linguist who has had coursework in Phonetics (which is to say, all linguists) will disagree with this claim that only the very young can properly pronounce certain sounds. Phonetics is the science of studying linguistic sounds and how they are produced. It can get quite exacting and, in fact, tedious because phoneticists desires are in transcribing and reproducing these sounds exactly. A phoneticist often does not depend on his or her ear to detect these sounds and their variations. They will often have a laboratory with test equipment to aid in their analysis. A phoneticist is also well schooled in the roles of the articulators and points of articulation -- those areas of the mouth and throat that are used to produce speech sounds -- both those that are moved and those that are not. So the phoneticist is capable of understanding not only the sounds that are being made, but how they are made. And once one understands how a sound is made, it can be duplicated.

I can state from a personal perspective that it wasn't until I'd had a course in phonetics that I'd mastered the uvular 'r', found in German and other languages, the trilled uvular 'r', the German umlaut, the concept of palatalization, and many other pronunciation situations. The International Phoneetic Alphabet is a great resource in this regard, as it codifies all -- or almost all to probably be more accurate -- sounds that are made in all of human speech. And once a speech sound has been analyzed and codified, it can be reproduced.

RichardJack said:

It's not only Nikon. I've heard many versions of Mamiya. When I worked for Olympus they pronounced Olympus as Oh-rimp-us, and every first Tuesday in November was "erection day".

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The pronunciation of Mamiya in Japanese is very straight-forward because it is a Japanese name, thus following Japanese pronunciation rules. It's only when it exists outside of Japan and isolated from Japanese pronunciation that questions begin to occur. When foreign words are added to the Japanese lexicon problems in pronunciation can emerge. O-rim-pa-su, i-re-ku-shyan, etc.

AgX said:

In Germany in general a kind of equilisation has established after WWII. Part of the reason (in contrast to neighbouring countries) likely are the millions of german refugees that mingled with the indegenious population.
Anyway, where I live I never heard anyone speak local dialect in public!

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So where is the local dialect spoken? In the home only? Not even down at the local tavern?

mooseontheloose said:

I seem to recall research saying that children who code switch are just using the first word that comes to mind, which is often in the language they learned the word first. However, I notice with my parents that they use really random words like "I saw le chien over there" with no rhyme or reason for the switch.

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I'm not sure I would subscribe to this theory, but the 'no rhyme nor reason' code switching of your parents might seem to indicate precisely this. I haven't noticed this more random nature of switching, though. These days I mostly get to listen to Chinese being spoken, and one thing I have noticed is that the Chinese don't use borrow words nearly to the extent that the Japanese do. My wife and her friends don't even code switch much. Typically, I'll hear the occasional "okay" or "yeah," but that's about it, really. This would seem to argue more in favore of my claim, that the words that are switched are those that are in very common usage in the switched language.

mooseontheloose said:

Some examples of Japanese English:
-barcode: a man's combover (this is my favourite)
-Viking (sounds more like biking, since they can't pronounce the "v") - a buffet-style restaurant, often yaki-niku (grilled meats)

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Hah! I love that first one. It evokes such a brilliant image! One that is spot-on!

As for the second, I suspect many people would be puzzled why the Japanese selected "Viking" for a buffet-style restaurant. It puzzled me for a while, but there was something nagging me at the back of my head, and then it hit me. The reason why the Japanese prefer "Viking" is because they'd probably just give up trying to pronounce smörgåsbord -- the original buffet -- pronounced by the Scandinavians (aka the Vikings) as (IPA) [ˈsmœrɡɔsˌbuːɖ]. As a matter of fact, I suspect, it was probably exactly their giving up on the pronunciation that led to the clever selection "Viking." Honestly, I find myself grinning, sitting here, imagining a group of Japanese folks trying to pronounce smörgåsbord, and giving up in frustration.

cooltouch said:

I can state from a personal perspective that it wasn't until I'd had a course in phonetics that I'd mastered the uvular 'r', found in German and other languages.


So where is the local dialect spoken? In the home only? Not even down at the local tavern?

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I'm a bad German, I don't speak the uvular R.

I only heard the local dialect spoken in special dialect gatherings of old men in the backroom of a pub.
At primary school sometimes there are courses to educate children to speak local dialect, in the end they have to speak a given text, what sounds very awkward.

In my region speaking dialect was (and still is) considered as being uneducated. In Germany even having an accent may form a problem, there are even courses for people to get rid of their accent as they find it unaccepted at work.
In the Cologne area that is to some extent different, but I still never overheard children speaking dialect on street.

In the south of the Netherlands I see a renaissance of local dialect, though it became sort of taboo in the 50s.

Wow, these are all great examples of language regulation by authority -- there's a term for it, but I've forgotten it. One thing about this type of linguistic control is that it almost never works in the long run. Languages change. When a language stops changing, it becomes a dead language. Like Latin or classical Greek. As long as children learn a language as a primary language, it remains a living language, and by this very nature of acquisition, a language changes. When children learn a language, each child in a sense makes an imperfect copy of the original. These small imperfections are what lead to language change over time. This process can't be stopped as long as a language remains a living language.

I consider these types of enforcements to be unhealthy and wrong-headed, but then I remind myself I'm a linguist -- I don't judge, I observe. Dialects are natural outgrowths of language use. They're normal and healthy developments. If the state desires that all citizens speak a language the same way, the best way I know how to do this naturally is to continue with what is already happening -- massive exposure to television, where the language being spoken is accentless. Over time, the TV watchers will adopt this accentless speech pattern, and regionalisms will be lost. I see this happening down here in Houston -- a very large Texas metropolis. The rather prominent Texas drawl, which used to be common to speech patterns around here has faded and is rarely heard anymore. Almost everybody sounds like the voices you hear on TV. I dunno if this is a good or bad thing -- it just is. I'm a linguist. I don't judge; I observe.

The term "authority" may not be the best as it often is used to hint at a something institutionalized.
What I referred too were mainly general society attitudes, of course executed by direct authority as parents, the same as kids not allowed playing outside on sundays, as I grew up with.

Institutional authority comes into play when at school a certain language is prescribed.
Something not uncommon in Europe where borders and dependencies varied constantly. Such did not matter as long the world of the people did not stretch beyond their parish. When national states emerged, this may have meant not only being forced into a standardized form of their language, but into an alien language, with from day to another teachers showing up not able to even understand their pupils. Such happened in "Germany" too.

I can't speak for the whole of Germany, but where I live I see the local dialect lost forever, with several generation never spoken it.

And even the Standard German is under threat. Due to the anglification, the introduction and use of English terms in acceleration.

I agree, the German as such is under thread but then again, language mutates because it is a living thing.
We can only control that on a very small scale, for example you as one person or maybe more people in your group of let's say five to ten friends, start to not using english words at all.
Maybe then, other people outside the group will hear that and maybe also start not using english words. But that also is mutation. Change in a living, spoken language is inevitable.

Speaking of controlling a language, in Germany we have the Duden, the language book. It holds all word and rules for writing and pronounciation.
But, as cooltouch said, linguists observe. So, the Duden being a book compiled by linguists, they observe and note changes.
But, and that is the crucial part, the noted changes then become rules.

Let me give you an example.
The German posessive is expressed like this: "Peters Auto." = Peter's car.
The English language uses an apostrophe, the German doesn't. Nowaday, with German being very much influenced by English, people have started using the English version, so "Peter's car" could be English or German simultaneously.
This is of course wrong when you're writing in German. A few years ago, this was still called the "Deppenapostroph", the "idiot's apostrophe", especially so, because people used the wrong character for it, they used an accent "´", not the apostrophe "'".

But, unfortunately, the Duden picked up on this development and now, both versions are considered "correct."
So much for mutation and controlling a language.

In English, the apostrophe is a handy device for indicating possession. But believe me when I tell you we have instances where apostrophe rules get complicated, and other instances where people use it wrong -- because they apparently don't understand how to use it.

Apostrophe rules can get complicated when we refer to possession by plurals or possession by entities with names that end in "s". Example: "These are our drivers' cars." Note the position of the apostrophe in the plural case. It's hanging out there by itself. But we also have instances like "This is Elias' car." This was the accepted way of indicating possessives with names ending in "s" for many years, but more recently, it's become acceptable to double up the "s" as in "This is Elias's car." The reason why the latter usage has won out is because it's spelled the way we typically pronounce a sentence like this. We say /eliases/ [ə'laiəsəs], not /elias/. So we're pronouncing that second "s". But it didn't always used to be this way. I can recall when I was in grade school that the teachers were quite strict about only the single "s" being pronounced in possessive instances with names that end in "s". Even back then, the second "s" was pronounced in common vernacular, so I always regarded it as a stupid rule. And I guess enough others did too, such that the language prescriptionists (grammarians, who do make the rules and who do judge) finally relented and gave way.

And then we have those clueless people who use apostrophes incorrectly. It's as if they're trying to emphasize the plural case. I see this most commonly on people's mailboxes, for example, where they'll have posted the last name of the family living at a home. E.g., "The Smith's" or even "The Jones's". Or perhaps they are indicating possession of the house without mentioning it? E.g., "The Smith's (residence)"? Perhaps, but this seems not to be the case. Apostrophes are also often used, albeit incorrectly, to clarify because it is felt to be needed. E.g., "one's and two's and three's" when it is perfectly acceptable and correct to write "ones and twos and threes". Another example, a bit closer to home. "I own two 50mm f/1.2s" is often written as "I have two 50mm f/1.2's". People feel the need to use an apostrophe after a numeral if it is a plural term, when this is clearly wrong grammatically, since the apostrophe never indicates 'plural'.

So here's hoping your Duden doesn't pick up on all the mess we have with apostrophes.

cooltouch said:

Wow, these are all great examples of language regulation by authority -- there's a term for it, but I've forgotten it.

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Cultural Marxism ?

cooltouch said:

In English, the apostrophe is a handy device for indicating possession. But believe me when I tell you we have instances where apostrophe rules get complicated, and other instances where people use it wrong -- because they apparently don't understand how to use it.
[...]
So here's hoping your Duden doesn't pick up on all the mess we have with apostrophes.

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Yes, I remember my old english teacher also being very strict about the thing with "Elias' something", we had to speak it correctly, with to "s".

Well, let's hope there is still some sense left in the ones responsible for the Duden and they don't take everything so seriously.
There are actually lots of people over here who write "DVD's" *shudder*

Skiver101 said:

Cultural Marxism ?

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Hehe -- nope, but fitting.

Actually, I did a bit of googling and found the term I was looking for. It's called "Lingusitc Prescriptivism." The whole "politically correct" movement is a great example of Linguistic Prescriptivism.

anfenglin said:

There are actually lots of people over here who write "DVD's" *shudder*

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Good example!

Now should discuss the dropping of "-ly" from adverbs.

Meh, I'm done, I'm going out taking pictures. With my Nikon.

Sirius Glass said:

Now should discuss the dropping of "-ly" from adverbs.

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Yes, and we would then have adjectives.

anfenglin said:

Meh, I'm done, I'm going out taking pictures. With my Nikon.

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Heard that. I'd like to get out with one of my film cameras too. Just got a DP-2 finder for one of my F2s and I'm anxious to try it out.

cooltouch said:

Heard that. I'd like to get out with one of my film cameras too. Just got a DP-2 finder for one of my F2s and I'm anxious to try it out.

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Very nice! I'm a simple man, I have a Nikomat FTN with Nikkor 50mm f2.