Then I guess I’ve never heard it pronounced that way. Do you have a sound clip I can listen to?
The cited pronunciation is a huge cultural marker. Although I have heard it from uneducated people, it seems to be most used by people who are afraid of being called elitist. Thus, I think it’s not so much a naturally evolved pronunciation so much as pseudo-folksy. It’s thus the exact opposite of the pretension of de-anglicizing standard pronunciations (i.e., an Anglo who insists on MAY hee ko for Mexico).
Uh…no? I’ll see if I can dig something up, but I’m not sure on where to look. Um, wait here, I guess.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai says it the way you do.
Good enough for me.
How do the British pronounce it?
Come on, really? I’ve lived over half my life in one of the whitest states in the US and even I’ve known plenty of people over the years who were born outside the US. I currently have coworkers from India, Nepal, and South Africa.
I’ll be honest, I don’t care how we pronounce the names of other countries, I just wish that people who are in the media could be consistent. I wandered into the living room a few months ago when NEC was on, and the woman was talking about i-rock. It took me a second to figure out she meant Iraq, not an upcoming offering from Apple to rival Rockband.
I am from Pakistan, though I left when I was 19. I did have a couple of Pathan friends, travelled some in the Northern Areas and there were lots of Pathans in Karachi, where I lived.
There are a huge number of dialects, and the two pronounciations are both approximately correct. Though you would never pronounce the “gh” quite as the sound in “ghost”. Somewhere between that and the sound of just “g” in gone.
You can hear “Afghanistan” pronounced about 4 seconds into This video. People speaking English that I’ve heard will say it something like that all the way up to the way Karzai says it on “Meet The Press”.
I love it. People bitched about Bush saying nucular because it made him sound like a hick, and people bitch about Pockistan because it makes Obama sound elitist.
It’s all vowels, anyway. They’re malleable.
And I’ve never noticed a difference between gone and ghost. (Well, actually, goes and ghost. Since /o/ is more close than /ɔ/, the consonant before the former is slightly more palatalized.)
Oh, so I was going the wrong direction with my interpretation. I was thinking the difference was in aspiration. You know, the difference between a whispered /d/ and /t/. This sounds closer to the difference between the Spanish and American /d/.
Oh, and I wouldnt’ call the American /t/ retroflex, but alveolar. The tip of the tonguge touches not the teeth, but the alveolar ridge just above and behind them. To me, retroflex has to at least go back to the palate.
Also, I believe Scottish uses a hard version of the dental /t/ instead of /θ/ (th in thin).
Thank you! This is just what I was thinking of.
I think Karzai might be changing it up when he speaks English, but I’m not sure. Karzai is Pashtun, and the video in that link is in Dari, so…I don’t know if it’s precisely the same in both languages.
All right, I’m in over my head in this discussion.
TheMightyAtlas said:
I don’t pronounce the “guh” in ghost any differently than the “guh” in goes or gone.
xash said:
I don’t think that’s English.
See, this is the problem with these pronunciation threads. It drives me crazy. No one ever knows what anyone else is talking about because no one uses IPA.
The ver title of this thread drives me up the wall, because it’s obviously written by someone who merges all the low vowels.
PACK-ih-stan - [pækɨstæn] (pack, rhyming with tack, stack, back, etc.) - nope, don’t say it that way
POCK-ih-stan - to me would be [pɒkɨstæn] - a low, back rounded vowel (rhyming with talk, balk, walk) - nope, don’t say it that way either
The actual pronunciation that the OP is trying to get at is [pakist̪ʰan] - it’s the ahhhh vowel, not the “pock” vowel. ([t̪ʰ] is an aspirated dental plosive; it’s not [θ], like in “thing,” which is a nonsibilant dental fricative)
MightyAtlas is talking about Indian English, so you wouldn’t get it.
In South Asian languages, consonants can be aspirated and nonaspirated, and this is a phonemic distinction. So South Asians who speak English apply their own notions of phonemes and tend to differentiate.
So, for example, “gost” and “ghost” would be pronounced differently [gost] vs. [ɡʱost].
“Afghanistan” has multiple pronunciations across South Asia. I pronounce it [apʰganist̪ʰan] - the aspiration is on the “p” and the “t” but not on the “g.”
acsenray said:
Well yes, but many of us don’t know IPA. We don’t know the technical terms some of you folks are throwing around (nonsibilant dental fricative, aspirated dental plosive). We just know “that doesn’t sound right”.
Sound files would help, but not everyone has access. (Youtube blocked at work.)
acsenray said:
POCK doesn’t rhyme with talk, balk, walk because there is an “l” in those other words. Try lock, stock, block. To me, that sounds like
lahk
stahk
blahk
Pahk’ ih stahn vs. Pak’ ee stan
Ahf gahn’ ih stahn vs. Af gan’ ee stan
But that probably doesn’t clarify because I’m not using IPA.
A silent “l”. All of those words you listed there, from POCK to block, rhyme to me.
IPA is easy to learn. An hour of study will bring a lifetime of joy. I’d really suggest that anyone interested in pronunciation should learn it. It really approaches nonsense to try to do without it.
You can’t know that it doesn’t sound right, because you’re not hearing anything on a text-based interface.
As I said, your accent has merged the low vowels. To me, the vowel in lock, stock, block, etc., is nothing like “ah.” To me, the “short O” and the “ah” sounds are completely different. (And I would advise you to forget you ever heard of “short” and “long” vowels.) On the other hand, my accent merges the cot and caught vowels, which is why you distinguish between “talk” and “tock” but I don’t.
See, this will keep going round and round, because there is no way to use these techniques to explain pronunciation to someone who speaks in a different accent.
There’s no better way than to start using it. These sites are good places to begin:
http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/vowels.html
http://alt-usage-english.org/ipa/ascii_ipa_combined.shtml#focus
There are audio samples available on these pages.
Some general hints for general American accents (when IPA symbols are unavailable, the ASCII IPA is given in parentheses)–
meet [mit]
mitt [mɪt] ([mIt])
mate [meɪt] ([meIt])
met [mɛt] ([mEt])
mat [mæt] ([m&t])
moot [mut]
mute [mjut]
moat [moʊt] ([moUt])
mutt [mʌt] ([mVt])
foot [fʊt] ([fUt])
The low and low-back vowels are very hard to get through, because there’s almost no common ground to talk about them in the context of American accents. This is where it’s very important to use IPA and also takes a little bit of puzzling out.
low-front unrounded - [a] - this sound is rarely heard in American accents outside of New England. Think of the way a Bostonian says “car park” [ka pak].
low-central unrounded - [a] - technically, it should be written as [ä], but the other one is so rare that the diacritic is generally dispensed with. - this is what I consider the AH sound. Someone once referred to it as “God’s own AH.” It’s open and low.
low-back unrounded - [ɑ] ([A]) - this is the sound you often hear in American “probably” [prɑbəbli] ([prAb@bli]) and “father” [fɑ:ðɚ] ([fAD@r]). However, this isn’t universal. In my accent, it’s [prɒbəbli] ([prA.b@bli]) and [faðɚ] ([faD@r]).
low-back rounded - [ɒ] ([A.]) - this is the “hot” sound in British RP. It also appears here and there all over the U.S.
Vowel mergers:
Father-bother: If your accent distinguishes them, it’s likely [fɑːðɚ] and [bɒðɚ]. If they sound the same, it’s probably [fɑːðɚ] and [bɑːðɚ]
Low-back (cot-caught) merger: If your accent distinguishes them, it’s likely [kɒt] and [kɔt].
This page has a ton of information on vowel mergers and splits in modern English - English-language vowel changes before historic /r/ - Wikipedia
Now do Caribbean. JFK changed the pronunciation of that while he was in office. Most thought it was due to his funny Bostonian accent. But it caught on . It was Care a be an .Then became Ca ribb ean. What is correct?
I doubt this is true, but if anyone’s got documentation on it, that would be interesting.
Both and neither.
West Indian English dialects (and, indeed, South Asian ones too) depend much less on the use of syllabic stress for meaning than other varieties of English.
So the native pronunciation is probably something like [ka ri bi ən], with stress moving according to “emotional” requirements. Transferring it to American English, it comes out either [kə 'rɪ bi ən] or [kæ rə 'bi ən] … both are equally close to the native pronunciation. Pick your poison.
The same thing happens with Hiroshima. I’ve seen people getting into tussles over whether it should be pronounced [hi ro 'shi mə] or [hi 'ro shə mə]. Compared to the native pronuncation, they’re equally right and wrong.
One thing that does bug me though is pronunciation of Moscow as [mɒskoʊ] instead of [mɒskaʊ]. I don’t know how that happened. There is a “cow” in Moscow. The English version comes from German Moskau. [mɒskoʊ] is no closer to the native Moskva, anyway.
And if you want help typing IPA, here’s a good website (at least for English). I use it every time I need a “funny” IPA symbol. It also suggest the best fonts to use.