Not Spanish, but when I lived in Brazil, “mocking” English sounded very much like English speakers trying to mock Chinese. Maybe gibberish is universal.
Yes but how often do people stand around speaking gibberish??
I was speaking with a customer once whose name was Joaquin Bonilla. We have a fairly large Spanish speaking population in these parts, so I knew to read it “hwa-KEEN bo-NEE-ya”. Guy stopped me right in mid sentence and corrected me indignantly, "It’s ‘bo NILL-a’. OK, fine, whatever, it’s your name and I’ll pronounce it ‘Throatwarbler’ if you want, but you’re the one being unusual so don’t go getting pissy from the get-go.
Making fun of the general trend.
It’s a perfect example of a hypercorrection: believing that the correct version cannot be correct.
Problem being: one, the “final vowel” is written with two vowels but in people who pronounce it as one actual vowel the “a” is there for decoration; two, some people pronounce it almost cow-cow; three, and some pronounce it cow-co.
Sometimes I think we should just nuke y’all and let Og sort his own… 
Oh, and that cow-cow or cow-co rhymes with slow, not with cow.
Pardel-Lux, some of them actually get it. Michael Robinson managed to avoid that particular minefield the inmense majority of the time, for example. Dude always had an English accent but “sticks extra vowels everywhere and can’t syllabize to save his life” wasn’t part of it.
Yes, you are right: Michael Robinson was an exceptionally good one, and a great loss. He knew what he wanted to say and how to say it.
I wonder whether that’s in revenge for the people of England’s pronouncing the name of Spanish literature’s probably most-loved character, as “Don KWICK-soat”?
No, it isn’t. Firstly, I didn’t believe that empanada could not be correct; I merely believed - until I was corrected - that it was empañada. If that’s a hypercorrection, then the word loses all meaning. It’s just an error.
English is funny - we use silent vowels quite frequently. It would surprise no one (no one fluent in English, that is) that the ‘a’ ending ‘cocoa’ is silent. Silent letters aren’t generally for decoration only, since they often affect the pronunciation of other vowels in the word. But in this case, it really is for decoration only, since we’d pronounce ‘coco’ the same way, as in the name, ‘Coco Chanel.’ Cow-cow or cow-co, on the other hand, would be pronounced quite differently, and I’ve never heard anyone say it anywhere near that way. Are you mixing it up with cacao (ca-cow)?
No Spanish-speaking countries have nukes.
Yet I hear many English speakers say “cocoa”, “coconut” or “Coco Chanel” who in at least one of the syllables, usually the first one, still do the fadeout effect on the “o”. (And I think that’s a better way of thinking of it: In English the sound of an “o” that ends the syllable tends to have a bit of a tailing-off “fadeout” rather than just stopping. A Spanish speaker parodying an English accent will exaggerate that into something rhyming with “slowww…”)
BTW: Spanish pronunciation of “coco”.
That we know of… OTOH we have settled on one pronunciation of “nuclear”, that oughta help save time.
Do all Spanish words that might otherwise begin with S necessarily have that “e” stuck in front of it by default? Seems to appear in a lot of Espanish words.
No (e.g. salsa, segundo, etc.). Spanish speakers don’t add an “e” when an initial “s” is followed by a vowel, but only when it’s followed by a consonant. Very few Spanish words start with an “s” followed by a consonant.
The USA.
Yeah, I’ll stipulate that we may do something with long-o sounds at the end of words that I can’t really distinguish, even if I do it myself. Phonology isn’t my strong suit. In that post I was really responding to the claim that the ‘co’ sound is anything like the sound in ‘cow.’ It’s possibly that by ‘cow’ Nava meant a work that starts with a hard-c and rhymes with ‘slow’, like one of the syllables of cocoa, but with the trailing off you describe.
Zing?
We should nuke ourselves? :dubious:
Another good example from Italy is this
Almost everything said about Spain in this thread applies to Italy as well. That’s what happens when a totalitarian regime keeps people from using foreign languages for decades.
That’s-a not-a true… :smack: https://www.ftmentertainment.it/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/la-ruota-della-fortuna-88be3fc551.jpg
You put names on nuclear missiles that then you cannot pronounce (have you heard Dave Mustaine try to pronounce “Polaris”?, I think he broke at least 3 vocal cords), and given your current standards of governance I wouldn’t be surprised if you did
We *have *accidentally dropped a couple of live nukes on ourselves over the years, fortunately the Big Boom part did not go off.
She clarified as much in post #65.
Hey, one of the Academias de la Lengua Española is that of the United States (interestingly under the “Norteamericana” designation as opposed to “Estadounidense”)
The second part, not true.
Many people in Spain could speak foreign languages during Franco’s regime. Those languages simply weren’t English; mainly they were German and/or French (plus of course Latin, since you didn’t graduate anything without it), the same languages which had been useful internationally for centuries. Despite what some people believe there are other languages out there and some of those languages were dominant in the diplomatic, trade and scientific worlds for centuries before the privileged geography of the US brought English to prominence.
Anyone who put an e- there was either pulling your leg or saying “eh… sha-kes-pe-A-re”. And if there’s a secondary stress it’s in KES, not sha. Oh, you’ve also managed to place pretty much every consonant in the wrong syllable.
This guy is certainly sticking a bit of an “e” before the “s” both times he says it (although it’s not very distinct), so at least some Spanish speakers do. However, he’s also not trying to pronounce it in a Spanish manner, but just using the English pronunciation with an “e” tacked in front. I agree the proper Spanish version shouldn’t tack on an “e,” since “h” isn’t really treated as a consonant in Spanish, so that the “s” should be treated as if it is followed directly by the vowel.
Sorry, Colibri, Nava is more right than you on this one. And on the “other languages spoken that are not English” Nava is not only right, but it was high time somebody said it, so thank you for it. The triumph of English as a diplomatic language was not cemented until the East European countries joined the EU, until the end of last century the language of diplomacy was French. It’s preeminence had been eroding for ages, but it did not collapse until around the mid-90’s. I was working in the EU then, I saw it, and it was quite impressive and unexpected for many.