In 2021 my wife and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary. When I learned the traditional gift was of tin, I commented that it must have been invented by a South African (in that dialect, “tin” and “ten” sound very similar - to my ears, at least. But they have already proven unreliable in these matters, so maybe it’s only funny to me).
In a similar vein, there’s a joke that in order to sound South African, simply pronounce the vowels in “mechanic” in any order. Works for me as a joke (pretty much) - obviously it’s not actually accurate.
Allowing for some variation in the r-coloured second syllable, due to his Indian accent, I hear him saying /ˈæʒɚ/. This is one of the acceptable pronunciations listed by the page you link to. In what way do you think he’s pronouncing it wrong?
My few exposures to administering a Microsoft DB server have taught me to pronounce its product name as “Squeal Server” because it’s just that painful.
I once addressed a Dawn and she got all offended, as if I had just misgendered her. I guess I was the first person she’d met who had the cot/caught merger.
The CEO is pronouncing it A-zure, while everyone else is pronouncing it as a-ZURE.
Azure means sky-blue. The nickname of the Italy national soccer football team is the Azzurri (“The Blues”) because of their blue kit (which is the traditional color of the royal House of Savoy).
Here’s pronunciation of Azzurri:
Azul is blue in Spanish and also has the emphasis on the second part of the word:
The first time I heard “SCSI”, it was when another engineer was describing the hardware of a new product for which we would be developing software. When I heard him say it had a “scuzzy disk interface”, I thought he was just being judgmental about it.
It shouldn’t need saying, but South Africa is a big country and has many, many dialects of English. Only a few of which have “tin” and “ten” sounding similar. My birth dialect certainly wasn’t one of them.
Thank you, yes of course that was imprecise of me. I should have typed “in some South African dialects”. I’m afraid I don’t know enough to specify which ones, but I was thinking a friend of mine who is from the Stellenbosch region. No offence caused, I hope.
ETA: or really, “accents” rather than “dialects”, as this is primarily a function of accent, I think.
In Romance and many times in Germanic languages the vowel determines the sound before it, i.e. if it’s soft or hard. I and E* are soft vowels, the rest hard. This is not so obvious with Germanic languages, since there are a lot of exceptions. But in the Romance it’s the reason why there are extra and silent consonants or vowels stuck in there. Spaghetti would get a soft G were it not for the H. Guernica is not Guh-er-nica in Spanish, it’s [ɡeɾˈnika]. In Italian ‘500’ is cinquecento [ˌtʃiŋkweˈtʃɛnto], (chinke-chento).
This is also the reason many English speakers think Iberian Spanish speakers lisp. Since Z and C followed by a soft vowel is pronounced as theta θ (in English [th]). They see a word - cinco - but hear [ˈθĩŋ.ko] (thingco) when they were expecting (singco)./t
But as I’ve already mentioned, the Wiktionary page does indicate that the word can be pronounced with the accent on the first syllable. (The first US pronunciation, and the first, second, and third UK pronunciations show the first syllable stressed.) If you think these pronunciations listed by Wiktionary are wrong, then why do you cite them in support of your claim?
I definitely heard it from the white Jo’burg cops. My ears adapt to accents pretty quickly, so I didn’t even notice it at first, but after a day or so, I started picking apart the accent, and noticed something like a pin/pen merger. I wasn’t as schooled in linguistic terms back then, so I’m not exactly sure if that was what was happening, but I know those vowels moved around a bit compared with American English.
