Years ago in an NPR interview Reuben Blades explained that Latinos like to pronounce the final vowels of English words, so that Tide detergent was pronounced “Teed-ay”. This was by way of explaining that his name should be pronounced as in knife blade, the way his English dad said it, instead of “Blah-des”.
Dan
Years ago in an NPR interview Reuben Blades explained that Latinos like to pronounce the final vowels of English words, so that Tide detergent was pronounced “Teed-ay”. This was by way of explaining that his name should be pronounced as in knife blade, the way his English dad said it, instead of “Blah-des”.
Dan
Guess how it reads Carrer Major if set to Catalan.
Carrer as if Valladolid. Major as if in Kansas.
Cop?
She means it should be just the first vowel of the diphthong, but English is wacky so that the vowel of “slow” varies, so it is not a good example. “Cop” isn’t right, either. Maybe that’s what tapes are for, (or click on the vowel on Wikipedia), because English does not like certain pure vowels…
Oh and slow are the same vowel sound to me, and I don’t believe I’m pronouncing it as a diphthong. Cop is totally different. Cope would the same, but cop is more like kahp - same vowel as rock or blah. This sounds like a subtle difference that anglophone ears aren’t going to be trained to hear.
When you say “slow”, does your mouth move during the pronunciation of the vowel? Most likely your mouth is more open at the start of the vowel and closes a bit toward the end. English doesn’t have a long-O sound that’s not a diphthong, so it’s hard for us to perceive the difference between a pure O (which we never hear or produce) and an O with a W-glide at the end.
Thanks, I guess then I’m doing the same diphthong for ‘oh’ and for ‘slow’, as my mouth moves the same way in saying both.
AFAICT, for me anyway, the diphthong is pronounced depending upon the following syllable and whether or not there is one. If you ask me if I’m going fast or slow, my one word response of “slow” will pronounce it. If I say “slow down”, it’s not there.
Ruben Blades’ grandfather was an English-speaking native of the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean, and like a lot of other West Indians came to Panama to work on the Panama Canal. He later moved to an English-speaking province of Panama, Bocas del Toro. Although he uses the English pronunciation of his name, Blades is usually referred to in Panama by the Spanish pronunciation. (I’ve met him in person a couple of times.)
Maybe, like the “O” in “Oprah” rather than “Oh!” Or even sharper, like “Oklahoma.”
This song was written to sound like English (but by Italians, not Spanish speakers).
Speaking just for myself, but I’m just not seeing (hearing) the alleged difference in these different O sounds.
That’s a fair bit closer than, say, “Ja-LA-peh-no”.
English speakers can have weird hyper-corrections as well- I’ve had to break out a dictionary to convince an English speaker with otherwise much better Spanish than mine that Jabanero is indeed spelled with a regular n and pronounced that way, rather than their theory that I was mispronouncing an ñ in ignorance.
Speaking of hyper-corrections: what language is this Jabanero suposed to be? 
(Never mind the meaning…)
Nava, good luck trying to explain to an English speaker that there are only five nice pure vowels plus some umlauts and that they only use them in diphtongs (that is an exageration, of course, but more correct than what they assume). I gave up long ago (lo dejé por imposible ;)). But sometimes, some of them pronounce the word *opera *with a proper O, a proper E and a proper A. And then they look at you and don’t get what you meant to say, like: “yeah, of course, so what?”.
(Of course in Spanish, the “H” in “Habanero” is silent.)
Oh, Dan Rather was a particularly grating example back in the 80s with him repeatedly referring to the city of Cartagena as “Cartageña” and nobody seemed to dare correct him.
Regarding oh and slow, cocoa might be a word Anglophones pronounce without turning the final vowel into a dipthong. I hear and say the two syllables the same: “co-co”, without getting that hint of the “w” sound on the end.
I’ve had the same problem with empanada (thinking the ‘n’ was an ‘ñ’.) I think it’s more just an error than a hypercorrection.
Getting back to the OP. I once had a Cuban friend play a Spanish novelty record for me in which the singer mocked Americans by putting a “ski” after many words. e.g.: Tomaski coca-colski en la playaski. (drinking coke at the beach) It might not have been a common practice but it was pretty funny.