Susan Leighton, from Woman on the Ledge, traded a few comments with me that led us to discuss the different ways fete is pronounced in the U.S. and the U.K.
Do we talk about the important stuff here or what?
In the U.S., we follow the French pronunciation—or try to, although our accents get in the way of it sounding like French French. But the effort seems to make sense, since the word came to us from French. So we say fett. In Britain, they pronounce it fate. So when a church holds a fete—as they seem to once a year—it sounds like they’re fated to it. Doomed, even. If you’ve ever worked on an event planning committee, you may understand this.
The English and the French have a long and spiky history, and maybe that explains why the British de-Frenchified the word, although it’s more likely that either the U.S. or the U.K.—or possibly both—shifted their pronunciation accidentally and so gradually that they didn’t know they were doing it, which is how these things tend to happen.
The same pronunciation pattern governs fillet and ballet. Americans pronounce them, more or less, fill-LAY and bahl-LAY.
But before I give you the British pronunciations, I have to interrupt myself: Nitpickers and experts, please note that I did say “more or less.” Trying to write out English pronunciation in any form that’s accessible to the average reader—or to me, while we’re at it—is a nightmare. Nothing in English is pronounced in any predictable way. When I edited kids’ books, we had to insert a vocabulary list at the back, and include pronunciations, and they were a nightmare. Take ballet: Is that bahl-LAY, as I wrote it? Not really, because the L isn‘t part of the first syllable, but if I wrote the syllable as bah you’d hear a different A—the one we use in bah, humbug—and if you said it that way you’d sound so phony you’d have to end the sentence with dahling.
We should have labeled the lists “Good Luck, Kids.” But the alternative is to use a bunch of symbols that only experts can read.
But back to ballet and fillet: (Are you actually interested in this? Skip ahead if you’re not. I’ll never know.) How do the British pronounce them? FILL-it and something I can’t reproduce but that sounds a hell of a lot like belly, so I’m forever thinking someone’s taken up belly dancing instead of ballet dancing.
Okay. I don’t know many people who’ve taken up either. In fact, I don’t think I know any. Still, I do know people who’ve gone to see ballet—or possibly belly—dancing, so the word, with all its confusions, has blown past my ear canals. Given how different the reputations of ballet and belly dancing are, the confusion’s is a small source of surprise and delight in my life.
I’m sure American pronunciations are equally absurd if you’re not used to them, but I am so I miss the jokes. I’ll be happy to hear from anyone who doesn’t.
As long as I’m talking about the oddities of the English language, I should point you toward an article in the New Yorker, “Love in Translation,” by Lauren Collins, which mentions linguists who’ve been trying to measure the difficulties of various languages in some objective way. What they came up with is called the Language Weirdness Index. You have to love researchers who could study 239 languages and come up with a weirdness index. English came in as the thirty-third weirdest. Some—although by no means all—of the weirdest are small and isolated languages. Apparently being spoken by a small, isolated group encourages that, since the societies are cohesive and everyone can count on everyone else to understand what they mean. Languages spoken by large groups get their rough edges rubbed off by contact with other groups.
See? I told you immigration was good for us all.
This seems to imply that however weird (to use the technical term) English is now, it was once a lot weirder.
From there it’s a largish leap to my next bit of language trivia, but it’s a good story, so let’s not quibble over the logic.
Early in her tenure as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton tried to negotiate what was being called a reset with Russia, so some genius got two red plastic Reset buttons made, one in English and one in Russian, and when she met with the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, she ceremoniously handed him the one in Russian. They were supposed to press them simultaneously, at which point absolutely nothing would happen because they were plastic toys.
Hush. Someone who’s presumed to be very smart spent a lot of time on this.
The problem (other than that they didn’t do anything) was that the Russian one didn’t say Reset, it said Overcharged—peregruzka, according to the article in the Guardian where I found this terribly important story. Do I trust the Guardian’s translation—or actually its transliteration of a translation? Not entirely, so I checked Google, which swore it should be peregruzhenny.
Do I trust Google? Well, no, but if the two had agreed I might have thought they were reliable. Once you get past the U, though, the two words don’t contain any of the same sounds. They do both follow it with a Z, but Z and ZH stand for different sounds.
I mention that because if you’re not used to a language the brain has a tendency to see a word and say “I don’t need to know this and won’t understand it anyway,” at which point it shuts down briefly. If yours did, you can come back now.
I don’t have a Russian-English dictionary, but I do have a Teach Yourself Russian book. Yeah, I do know how well those work, but I was trying to revive my Russian, which was never very good and has been dormant for over 50 years. That’s not exactly the same as learning it from scratch, so I thought the book might be worth a try. It was second hand, so I didn’t lose much.
Back when I bought it, we had a Russian neighbor whose English was even more limited than my Russian, and I was trying to add a few sentences to the handful we could exchange. These were, “How are you?” “I am well, thank you.” “I am very well.” “Today is beautiful. “ “Today is not beautiful.” Plus a few others that I could cobble together but was less sure of. I could have been saying I was squirting toothpaste in my ear and being overcharged. Except that I don’t know the word for toothpaste. Or ear. I do, sort of, know the past tense.
I think.
Anyway, the book has a small vocabulary list in the back. It’s labeled “Good Luck, Kids.” I looked for overcharged, but the closest thing I could find was over there. I’m willing to bet that in no language are those the same.
I don’t know how to type Russian on my computer and I could transliterate that from the Cyrillic alphabet to the Roman one, but honestly, what’s the point? We might as well be pushing a red plastic toy button.
You have to wonder, once you leave the wonders of bad transliteration behind, exactly what form of overcharged the Russian word—whatever it actually was—meant. Overcharged as in you paid too much? Or overcharged as in I told you you should’ve unplugged that battery last night?
Any Russian speakers out there, what word were they really looking for? And what is the word for overcharged?
I don’t know what position Russian holds on the Language Weirdness Index.
I don’t know what position I hold on the Human Weirdness Index.
Given how bizarre the American election is getting, I should probably add that I don’t consider the Reset Scandal a reason to change my vote.
Pingback: British and American pronunciation, and other ways of getting in trouble | Matthews' Blog
Only the British who want you to think they’re posher than they actually are pronounce ballet as ‘belly’!
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How does everyone else pronounce it? Or–given the range of accents–how do at least a few other people pronounce it?
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Everyone I know, including me, says ‘ball-ay’ with the stress on the first syllable. Some put the stress on the second syllable in a nod to the original French.
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I have a hunch that we’re talking about the same set of sounds, but to my ear it sounds close enough to belly that I get thrown. Although I’ll admit it’s not exactly belly.
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I really wish we had that “reset” button for that whole mess they call “politics” here.
Have a great weekend,
Pit
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Sadly, it’s only a plastic toy.
Pit, would you take a look at Anita Lewis’s comment (above? below?) and tell us whether Kennedy really did say he was a jelly doughnut?
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Ellen,
I’m sorry for answering that late, but here I go: the opinion expressed in “The Atlantic” is correct. Kennedy did not say that he’s a jelly donut, even if it could be construed as that. “(Ein) Berliner” can indeed mean a jelly donut, but no (native) speaker of German would misunderstood him. In fact, just “Berliner” in that context would sound unnatural to me as, like The Atlantic explained, that would mean he was born there.
Hope that helps,
Pit
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It does help and I appreciate it, but as a fan of bad translations I’m deeply disappointed.
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I’m a fan of those, too. Sometimes I do computer translations of my texts just for the fun of it. ;)
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Well, I like bad translations, too. We have plenty of jokes with them in German(y). Sometimes, btw, I simply get computer translations of my texts, just to get a good laugh.
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What an inspired (and insane) idea. You might be interested in the link I embedded in a discussion, above, with KoolKosherKitchen, to a poet named Robert Okaji, who starts with garbled machine translations and manages to extract some beautiful poetry from it. He includes the translation he worked from, which is fascinating.
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Thx for the link tip.
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Here’s one I found in a German online newspaper today: [the Director of National Intelligence] “uebersieht” [no less than 17 intelligende agencies]. “Uebersieht” means “overlooks” = “misses”. I assume it was a literal translation of “oversees” = “watches over” or “controls”. But that wrong translation in a way is completely on the mark, isn’t it? ;)
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Lovely. It makes perfect sense to translate it that way, except for the fact that it’s completely wrong.
Isn’t it odd, though, that English gives such different meanings to overlooks and oversees?
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I love those nuances, and I love the mistakes my fellow countrymen – and me, too – make with these. I think I got a good one oce:
I wanted to translate the German “Unternehmer”, which would have been “entrepreneur”. Well, I translated literally: “Unter” as “under” and “nehmer” as “taker”! ;) “Undertaker” certainly is an entrepreneur of sorts, isn’t it?
I think I might still do something like this once in a while. Hopefully not too often.
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Beautiful. When I was about 15, I mispronounced noncarbonated in Spanish and everyone around me did a double take. I think what they heard was the second person informal of the verb to fuck. It wouldn’t have been half so funny if I hadn’t been so young and clueless.
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My brother moved to Australia many years ago. I Skype with him and note many “weird” ways he says things and one of them is “fillet” which is now the British way. I guess it is best to fit in especially if you decide to be a teacher of children.
I also thought about President Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” which I was taught in German class was wrong, because putting “ein” in there changes it to “I am a jelly donut.” I was going to tell you about that. I decided to look up a good source, but instead I find an article in Atlantic that says this is not so:
“Afterward it would be suggested that Kennedy had got the translation wrong—that by using the article ein before the word Berliner, he had mistakenly called himself a jelly doughnut. In fact, Kennedy was correct. To state Ich bin Berliner would have suggested being born in Berlin, whereas adding the word ein implied being a Berliner in spirit. His audience understood that he meant to show his solidarity.”
Of course, that could be wrong, too, but I think it is right. For years I have believed that. Your article pushed me to find the truth.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/08/the-real-meaning-of-ich-bin-ein-berliner/309500/
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If Kennedy wasn’t a jelly doughnut, I’m deeply disappointed, because I’ve loved that story. Even better, though, is a tale about Pepsi spending a shitload of money on an ad campaign in Taiwan around the slogan Come Alive, You’re in the Pepsi Generation. According to the tale I heard, their billboards ended up saying Pepsi Cola Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Grave.
I can only hope it’s true.
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I was just going to suggest that you compare the Australian accent.
Funny experience about accents with me. When I grew up in Australia until the 8th grade, I used to have an Australian accent. Then, studying in a British curriculum based school, I had developed a British accent and now I am in a university that follows American style so I now finally have an accent that is a mixture of Australian, British and American. Haha :)
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I know someone who works as a dialogue coach and has an amazing ability to identify accents. You’d make her head spin.
Unfortunately, I don’t know the Australian accent well enough to write anything even vaguely sensible about it.
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I remember years ago when I was on a chorus tour in England, staying with a host family for an evening, and they served me a very nice meal (!), and I asked what it was. I was told something that sounded like zoo-chee-nee stuffed with passed-uh. it took me a minute to realize that it was zucchini with pasta. I guess I’m spoiled by the way that Americans tend to keep the original pronunciation of foreign words, and it takes me aback when other people don’t.
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That’s because they were translating for you. Here they call them courgettes. With the French pronunciation. And eggplant? That’s aubergine.
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Reblogged this on HarsH ReaLiTy and commented:
I always feel more educated after reading Ellen’s blog. Check her website out and see if you feel the same way! -OM
Note: Comments disabled here. Please visit their blog.
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I know you said not to thank you for reblogging, but thanks anyway. I do appreciate it. And I wondered where all the new names were coming from.
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Well, it is no big deal. Have a great weekend Ellen!
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No, but it’s a big help.
You have a good weekend too.
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Thank you! 🍾😄
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Not sure how y’all divide syllables, but the way I was taught in school (I’m American btw), in the instance of double consonants it divides between them. So it’s technically correct to have the L ending the first & another L begin the next. Also I always liked those simplified children’s book pronunciation guides, so much better than spending forever flipping from the word in the dictionary to the crazy decoder again & again, then trying to stitch those sounds together. Though I generally get the impression of AH making the same A sound as ball, but when I hear the word ballet from other bent Americans I hear the same A sound as in call. I feel like I’m harping on irrelevant details…. Not trying to harp on anything, lol, just trying to join the conversation. We seem to have a lot of French borrowings with a hard A sound in the place of the letters ET (I have no idea how it may be spelled elsewhere, but my ignorance should not be shocking, as I mentioned I am American, lol).
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The whole business about breaking syllables–if I understand it correctly, and I may not–gets messy because there are two different reasons to do it. One is so you can hyphenate a word at the end of a line, and that’s where the rule about breaking it between double consonants comes in. But when you’re trying to cobble together some kind of guide to pronunciation, though, that doesn’t really work, because that’s not (or not necessarily) what we do with the sound. A book on Yiddish finds a clever way around the whole mess by telling you what word or phrase in English the Yiddish rhymes with.
Which works well until you start wrestling with the varying pronunciations English has.
Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
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I think English should definitely win an overly complicated award, not that it’s the only language that is impressively wtf LOL
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I couldn’t agree more.
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I never had much problem with pronunciation when I was in England, but words were a different matter. I went into an outfitter once and asked for a flashlight, took an interminable amount of time to get across what I wanted. To me a torch was something you set on fire.
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When you get into clothing, it gets even worse. A vest is an undershirt, and it gets more complicated from there.
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Yeah, I had a lot of problems shopping. Fortunately, most people were patient and willing to work through it. One thing I never could get used to was that in the little town I was in everything closed down before I got back to the hotel, except for the pubs.
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…where you could drown your disappointment.
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Thanks for the pointer to the Language Weirdness Index! Small quibble as a linguist and a guy who recently taught a course on statistics for linguistic research: the sample size was 239 languages. No one actually knows how many languages there are–the low estimates are around 5,000, and the high end tends to be around 10,000. (Whatever the number is, the guess is that by the end of the century, there will only be half as many.) If you take the low-end estimate, they looked at 4.8% of the world’s languages. That might be OK, actually–we estimate the outcome of US presidential elections on the basis of much, much smaller samples of the American population, and don’t do too bad of a job. But, to know whether or not 239 is a sufficiently large sample, you need to know something about the degree of variability in the scores. I haven’t been able to find the study yet–do you happen to know where to find it?
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Good point, and one I hadn’t given three seconds’ thought to. The study was done by a company called Idibon, which is on Twitter. The researcher who is named (I assume there were others as well) is Tyler Schnoebelen–also on Twitter. Both links are embedded in the Foreign Policy article. It also had a link on the word found, but wouldn’t you know, it didn’t lead anywhere. So, no, I haven’t found a copy of the study online, but you could probably contact Schnoebelen on Twitter. I suspect he’d take you more seriously than he’d take me. Which, I have to say, only makes sense.
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I think there need to be more Weirdness Indicies in the world.
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Oh, absolutely.
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And our (USA) election should ought to be at the very top of every single one of them.
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It’s off the charts.
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Absolutely!
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The UK pronunciation of “aluminum” always amuses me for some reason. Try as I might, I just can’t get my lips and tongue to do the gyrations necessary to attempt the same pronunciation.
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They find our pronunciation equally funny. Although I’m convinced they find our pronunciation of butter even funnier.
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I finally understood the British mis-pronunciation of our word “aluminum” when I saw it written by a Brit as “aluminium”, which is exactly how they pronounce it. Apparently the problem isn’t one of pronunciation, but of spelling.
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For a long time, I assumed the same thing you did–that we spelled the word the same way. I have no idea how we ended up with different spellings, but it all seemed (very, very briefly) to make sense when I saw the word written out in British English.
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OOooowwww you make me laugh and cry and OOOOooooww, why not. I don’t fete, I don’t believe in fate and I can’t pronounce my own name…..so hell’s bells lets have a parteee……
~~dru~~
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Hell, it’s as good a reason to have a party as anything else. Just push that red plastic button over there to let everyone know it’s starting. That’s the one. It says something in Russian and we’re not sure what it means, but we’re pretty sure it’s something about a party.
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What a way to go!!!
The goddess Formaldehydely ~ known as ~~dru~~
https://saywhatumean2say.com/2016/11/04/i-am-a-goddess/
ps….I like Dorothy parker and Dorothy sayers…go figure.
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Thank you so much Ellen, for the mention at the beginning of your very witty blog. My English friend from Yorkshire and I were discussing the pronunciation of fillet last month. We were also discussing how to tell an American and an English person apart from spelling. Humour, humor, colour, color, favourite, favorite and the list goes on and on. Of course we also realised (realized for us in the states) even more differences in spelling. Currently, I am residing in the Southeastern part of the US. Sometimes I have a hard time deciphering exactly what someone is saying due to the dialect differences. It can make for interesting conversations.
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And thanks to you for pushing me in this direction. It is odd, when you think about it, that with all the differences within each country, when we focus on the differences between the two countries we–and I include myself here–act as if the U.S. has a single way of speaking and Britain does too. Which is completely ridiculous.
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I know what you mean. It is not like I have to pull out a Google translator whilst (!) speaking with someone from England.
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I’m quite at home in both British and American English, so I love discussions like this one! And I love pronouncing fillet the British way and watching people (in the US) look startled and as if they are wondering whether they should “correct” me or just let it go! :D
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Do you dabble in aubergines and courgettes as well? Just to mess with people’s heads?
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I find this post and its comments interesting and will now hmm about words s’more. I enjoy that sorta thing.
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That’s one thing about English: It can keep a person hmmming forever.
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“Two nations divided by a common language” (Churchhill) still holds true. I have to remind myself that the English invented English. Thanks for the linguistic funfacts!
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They did, but no one gets to claim sole ownership.
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Dear Ellen, I love your witty and quirkily informative blog, but as the self proclaimed president of the Australian branch of the Grammar Nazis’ society, I have to say this: one gets INTO trouble and is then IN trouble. I hope you will forgive this correction when I mention that I bought your novel and loved it too.
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Oh, hell, for that I’ll forgive you anything. Even being right.
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P.S. I can always claim it’s a regional difference, but I have no idea if it is.
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Here you go: PEREGRUZHENY is an adjective, and it does not mean OVERCHARGED; it means OVERLOADED, i.e. with extra weight. PEREGRUZKA is a noun, and as with many Russian words, consonant Z at the end of a noun becomes ZH when a suffix is added to make it an adjective. The word they were looking for, interestingly enough, was PERESTROIKA, if they wanted a noun, or PERESTROIT’, as a verb, since the English RESET could possibly serve as both. Thank you for the anecdote; I will spread it in the Russian community.
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Oh, you are wonderful. Thanks. I just love that even the correction was wrong. Somehow that seems consistent with the tale.
Given the politics of the word perestroika, I can’t see them wandering in with a plastic button saying that. The meanings would have been even more unpredictable than the simple translation problems they had.
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I also thought it was hilarious!
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One thing we can all learn from this is never to get a tattoo in a language we don’t speak. Especially if the tattoo artist doesn’t speak it either.
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Well, the second thing to learn is that Google Translate is an idiot.
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It is, but a very, very funny one. It once offered to translate the Greek word for No (in Latin letters, oxi). I couldn’t resist and told it to go ahead. It translated it as oxi.
I was overwhelmed by gratitude.
There’s a really very good poet, Robert Okaji, who occasionally takes Google-translated poems and turns them from gibberish into surprisingly lovely poems. I have no idea how he find sense in them, but maybe the mess Google makes of them frees him in someway.
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I’ll look for his poems, thank you. My son who works with digital translations as a linguist composes limericks – same idea.
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Part of what I like about his translations–in addition to the fact that they’re good–is that he also publishes the gibberish translation from which he drew his.
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I am tremendously impressed by his poetry, and I thank you for pointing me towards his blog, but I haven’t found any translations. When you have a chance, could you send me a link? Thank you in advance!
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Here’s one. If you scroll down past his poem, you’ll find the gibberish he managed to dig it out of.
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Got it, thank you! I also reblogged one of his food poems. Thank you for connecting me to his blog.
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My pleasure–genuinely. He’s one of the real ones and I’m happy to spread the word.
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I trust you are correct because you seem authoritative. Perhaps you could clear this up for me. When I type “reset” into Google Translate and ask it to translate it to Russian, it responds with “cброс”. When I ask it to translate “reset password” from English to Russian, it responds with “Сброс пароля”.
I admit I do not read Russian, but it appears to me that “cброс” and “Сброс” are the same, and must mean exactly what “reset” is intended to convey. It seems unlikely to me, but is it possible that “cброс” would be written as “peregruzheny” in English?
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My Russian is bad enough that I have to sound it out letter by letter, with the occasional hesitation over letters I’m less certain of. But with that out of the way, the word Google gave you is–I think–pronounced sporos. You might want to look at koolkosherkitchen’s comment, above, for a comment from someone who actually knows her Russian.
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Yes, “cброс” and “Сброс” are the same, with the latter capitalized. It means “discarded,” so “Сброс пароля” means “password discarded,’ rather then reset. None of it translates as “peregruzheny” (adjective) or “peregruzka” (noun). “Сброс” was adapted as part of professional jargon for lack of a more exact Russian equivalent. In a different context, it is also used as “send” (send an e-mail, for instance). There are quite a few other terms that are even more interesting, such as “e-mail” = “mylo” (soap), or “download” = “skachat'” (pump up). Therefore, “send an e-mail” will be “сбрось мыло” (discard soap).
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Discard soap? You know the story about Rip Van Winkle, who sleeps for–what is it? forty years?–and then wanders back into town? So imagine waking up and being told to discard your soap. Old Rip had an easy ride compared to that. Thanks again for your knowledgeable contributions.
But soap? I’ll be giggling about that for the rest of the day. I wonder what the logic behind that was.
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There is an alliteration: mail – mylo. Sometimes my husband and I feel like Rip Van Winkle when we watch recent Russian movies or meet newly arrived people. Sometimes I have to turn to my son for translation, since he communicates with Russian translators daily as a part of his job.
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I see the logic of mylo, then–sort of.
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You are looking for Russian logic. You’ve got to be kidding.
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Clearly, I’ve got a lot to learn on the subject.
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No you don’t – let them stew!
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Oh, I don’t know. I love absurdity. I might feel right at home.
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Have you read The Master and Margarita?
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I saw a staged production of it.
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So you have an idea of the Russian absurdity.
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I didn’t think of it that way, but I guess I do.
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Thank you, koolkosherkitchen. That clears up my confusion about “cброс”. Now I’m confused about how the Russians manage to understand anything about technology if they don’t have a specific vocabulary for it.
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I don’t have any information on the subject, but I’ll wade in anyway and say that they just tell each other to delete the soap and everyone understands everything. Since they were the first ones to get a satellite into space, it must work.
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Oh, no problem with that. They just mangle foreign terminology to the point of being barely recognizable. They are quite advanced in technology, though, as the recent news regarding Russian hackers has demonstrated. Thanks for your interest,
Dolly
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When mentioning an English word to an American readership, I usually give rhyming words (and then hope for the best!) While I left there some years ago, I’m used to the South-East England pronunciation of ballet which rhymes with Calais and valet. In other words the ‘ba’ of bat not the ‘ba’ of bar, followed by ‘ay’ to rhyme with May. Maybe in Cornwall you’re hearing the South-West England version of the word? This is the thing – different regions of the UK, just like different states in the US, have their own pronunciations.
By the way, anyone can put translations into Google translate and the site also offers alternative translations but how someone who doesn’t know a language is supposed to choose, is anyone’s guess. I’m (ultra-slowly) teaching myself Russian and what I do find useful in Google translate is they have both a virtual keyboard and a virtual scribble-board, so if you know the alphabet you can input it either way.
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That explains some of the Google translate’s insanity–it gives equal weight to people who know what they’re talking about and people who don’t. Reminds me of a certain election I’ve heard about.
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Are you, as an ex-pat, glued to the news today?
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If I thought it would help, I would be, but no. I did check the online news just now, but it’s too early for there to be much to report. I tend to stick my head in the sand till the results come it.
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Good thinking.
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It’s now late on Wednesday afternoon. I’m about to stick my head back in the sand for a few years.
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All sensible Americans will be feeling the same. Alas for the unsensible (insensible?) ones that didn’t. :(
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Mmmm… add a couple of Ls to that (ballet in my previous comment).
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You already have two. Did you want four?
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No, just the two existing ones that somehow didn’t make it into my last comment that should have provided a middle to the ‘ba’ and the ‘ay’. :)
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I can if you like, but I think it’s easier to read as it is. You get to compare the sounds in the same form as the word it’s closest to.
Oh, good grief. Trying to say that gave me heartburn. It all falls off the edge of the English language and there’s nothing to do but draw diagrams and wave out arms. And possibly shout a lot.
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Haha! Now you know how it feels to be British – that’s what we do: wave our arms, draw diagrams, and shout a lot!
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Maybe, but you shout very quietly.
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Haha I like that you think of reviving your Russian from time to time. I did the same a few years ago, got a kind of modern teach-yourself book with pages of little stickers with the words in Russian you had to cut out and put all over your house on the object in question. My apartment looked like a kind of garage sale event for months but then I dropped the project. Cyrillic is too much of a brain twister to go back to. BTW I don’t know why WordPress doesn’t pop up your new posts on my Reader?
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It’s a mystery. My best guess is that if you hit the RSS Feed button, they should appear in your email inbox instead.
Having been away from Russian for so long, I find the Cyrillic alphabet a struggle, although I don’t remember it being hard to learn the first time around. I have to sound words out letter by letter, with a few stops to wonder if that one really is pronounced like a P.
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In my case, there was a point learning it originally as I was living in Moscow. But like you, I find the alphabet offputting and am not sure I want to make that much of an effort… with no real reason to.
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It’s hard to get excited about a language if you don’t have anyone to use it with. Or at least it is for me.
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Yes, it was exciting when it helped me sometimes communicate with locals to break the barrier of fear in the good old USSR
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Pingback: British and American pronunciation: a link | Notes from the U.K.
‘Languages spoken by large groups get their rough edges rubbed off by contact with other groups.’ Let’s hope that in the aftermath of this horrible election, the same thing goes for attitudes. xoxoxo
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I do wish it worked that way.
Actually, now that you bring it up, I’ve read some studies about attitudes toward immigrants in the U.K., and people who’ve had the least contact with immigrants seem to be the most worked up about them.
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Yup. You’ve got that right, Ellen. It’s hard to hate a whole group if you work alongside one another, or if you hang out in the gym, etc. Even riding together on a bus can have a positive impact. Isolated people scare me. And I’m not even an immigrant. (Though my great-grandparents were.)
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As were my father’s parents. I feel like we all need to keep faith with those immigrants in our history and protect today’s immigrants as best we can.
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I always enjoy your linguistics and pronunciation posts. However, I realized that I have not been getting posts from you appearing in my wordpress reader. What the heck? I’ve been robbed. So I’ve tried unfollowing and then refollowing to see if they will now appear.
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That happened to someone else recently as well. If that doesn’t work, try following it on the RSS feed, which should drop the posts into your email inbox.
Emphasis on should. I think it’ll work.
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Thanks. It happened before with another blog too. Annoying. Though I should have noticed earlier.
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Absence is a lot harder to keep track of than presence.
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All of this is of great interest to me, everything that has to do with translating and languages. Especially I thank you for the New Yorker article, as someone who has come from one language into another but lives in the third.
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The author of that article just published a book (neatly timed to coincide with the article, or more likely the other way around). I can’t think of the title, but the article was, I think, a piece of it, so I’m guessing it’s an extended discussion of the topic.
What’s it been like for you, living in a third language? Do you feel some loss–that the language can’t touch some of the depths of your first or second languages? I ask in part because my grandparents spoke to their kids in English–their second or third language–and I’ve often wondered what that was like for them. My Spanish isn’t good enough to be a fair comparison, but I do know the feeling of trying to express a thought that’s too big (or sometimes only too amorphous) for my competence in the language.
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Yes, I saw the book, it’s called “When in French” (I think). The thing is that I don’t speak French so examples she gives are lost on me (or rather they make me learn, which is good). But I can follow her thoughts remarkably well. I moved from Slovenia (and my Slovenian parents and English studies) to Italy less than four years ago to live and love to the best of my abilities. I speak English with my Italian partner though, and my emerging Italian with his relatives and everybody else. Before me, his English was limited to reading and writing (to online use). He is speaking and listening to it now for the first time in his life. We are both introverts. I don’t have many contacts around here, not to say friends. Also, no Italian TV (it’s just terrible). The situation is peculiar, that’s for sure. I think I could say I’m practically an English speaker now. However, it would be to our advantage if I started to speak Italian with him. Time will tell…
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Yes, I think that is the title.
Your English is amazing, by the way. If my Spanish were anywhere near that standard, I’d be in danger of bursting with pride.
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Ahhh, the editor and then you go and say something as nice. :o Thank you! Pride and me are on strange terms. Might believe you though… ;)
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POtato/potAto, tOmato/tomAto, Fait, Fete, Fait – American pronunciation isn’t a mystery; it follows the conventions established by Webster in his dictionary and Webster effectively removed all elements of French spellings from words used in what is curiously called American English. English as spoken in Britian, specifically England, continues to evolve …and continues to baffle both native and non-native speakers alike.
An interesting post.
Regards,
Talk
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My understanding–and I’m far from being an expert–is that Webster modified the spellings but I’ve never seen any pronunciation-related changed attributed to him.
American English continues to evolve as well. No language can help but change, to the distress of the Academie Francaise, which does its damnedest to keep French “pure.” As if any language was pure, but that’s a whole ‘nother discussion. (That last phrase, I suspect, is an example of American English’s evolution.)
What makes you say American English is a curious name for the version spoken there?
Long may both versions of the language continue to evolve and baffle us.
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Yes, Webster modified the spellings, but I would argue that by virtue of changing the spellings, it altered the way sounds within words are anticipated and spoken. The English language has either been enlivened, or excessively complicated by Norman French. So to remove the French letter combinations is to make spelling and pronunciation more predictable. Although native English speakers around the globe know that the letters of the alphabet do not represent the sounds we actually produce when we say a word, the simplification, or organisation of the spellings has become a better guide to pronunciation for those learning English as a second language in the US, as opposed to the UK.
Why do I find the distinction between English spoken here and English spoken over there curious? It seems to me that we tend to categorise verbal communication based on whether it is an accent, a dialect, or a language and the essential difference between them is really nothing more than the number of people who fall into each group. It seems to me that American English is regarded as a language because there are over 300 million Americans; when in reality, the difference is entirely based on accent. The vast majority of native English speakers spread out across all of the continents of the globe understand one another. Clearly, if we were genuinely speaking different languages then we would not… would we?
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American and British English are too close together to be different languages, regardless of how many people speak them, and I’ve never heard anyone else treat them as separate languages. As for Webster’s simplifications, I’m unconvinced. You make a reasonable argument about the effect they might have had, but before I’ll be ready to believe that’s what happened I’d want to see evidence from a contemporary observer that in fact it did happen.
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American and British English are too close together to be different languages, regardless of how many people speak them, and I’ve never heard anyone talk about them as separate languages. As for Webster’s simplifications, I’m unconvinced. You make a reasonable argument about the effect they might have had, but before I’ll be ready to believe that’s what happened I’d want to see evidence from a contemporary observer that in fact it did happen.
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