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