To be fair, that’s often because the name is originally in Swedish or Polish or who knows what language. But “regular” English names are usually not a problem. Smith, Jones, Howard, Dean, White, Brown, Clinton, Bush.
For those both suffering vocal disorders and raised speaking tonal languages, the vast majority can still use tone well enough to aid in pronunciation.
Consider that in human languages, the individual speech sounds in a given language’s phonetic inventory will feature some redundancy so that even if a sound is produced imperfectly, the meaning of an overall utterance can be discerned. As psychologist/linguist Stephen Pinker wrote in The Language Instinct :
In the comprehension of speech, the redundancy conferred by phonological rules can compensate for some of the ambiguity of the sound wave. For example, a speaker may know that thisrip must be *this rip *and not *the srip *because in English the initial consonant cluster *sr *is illegal.
Now then, if the speech is disordered enough – for example, nerve damage causing a lack of muscle control – so that tones cannot be reliably produced … then yes, comprehension will be limited. This, of course, can happen to speakers of any language given severe enough impairment.
A side question you didn’t ask outright, but you might have been kind of getting at when mentioning laryngitis: Yes, tones can be whispered or rasped. And even if the rasping is so bad that a speaker’s tones, etc., are unstable, conversational context and phonetic redundancy fill in a lot of mental blanks for a listener.
Thank you. I’d forgotten that.
I understand, but for the purposes of a choir, is that difference even present? Again, I don’t know much about vocal training, but it seems to me it wouldn’t matter. Or at least, that singing is so dependent on stylization that wouldn’t be consistent anyway.
This is more cultural and not so much having to do with language.
The Romance languages do happen to be spoken in places where this kind of extra-vocal expressiveness is ingrained in the local culture of interpersonal communication. Take Mediterranean Europe, and lets throw in the Balkan peninsula, too. Romance languages are indeed spoken in Spain, France, Italy, and Romania among others. And yes, the communication cultures in most parts of southern Europe permit and sometimes encourage flamboyant speech & gestures. But it’s not just the Romance language countries – it’s also Greece and Bulgaria, for example.
And then, Northern Europe is the flip side – a generally staid and conservative communication culture. Scandinavia, the UK, Germany, and the Baltic countries collectively represent a few different language families but still share similarities in their approaches to interpersonal speech.
The Danes have a saying that Danish is not so much a language as a throat disease 
While no linguistic expert, I thought Hawaiian had only 4 vowels, no e ?
My high school French teacher, on hearing our impure vowels, would say with exaggerated diphthongs “Vous parlez comme des vaches américaines.”
a, e, h, i, k, l, m, n, o, p, u, w.
State motto: “Ua Mau ke Ea o ka Aina i ka Pono”, commonly translated as “The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness”.
Hawaiian phrasebook and pronunciation guide for the malinihis.
(Note, there are 5 vowels in the alphabet, but some of them additionally have “short” and “long” sounds depending on whether they are in a stressed or unstressed syllable.)
I can, perhaps, help you a bit with (5). The south west of England has an rrrrr sound similar to the American one. Plymouth… Plymouth Fathers… Mayflower…rrrrr … West Country English - Wikipedia ???
How are singers of English supposed to sing without English dipthongs?
Like shitty Spanish choirs, if they’re lucky.
Perhaps you could say I’m a lazy speaker as well (native NY), because when studying French diction (for speech, not for song–they are two different subjects) my lip muscles hurt at the end of the day.
To be even fairer, They are all American names, regardless of ancestry. But you are correct. When I state my given name here in Mexico (which I don’t do, unless it is something official) they are confused.
Thanks for your reply JM. Sometimes I think my posts are written in invisible ink.
No expert on choral training, folks :o … these are good questions for pianodave, though. I was thinking maybe his singers were working with liturgical music and Latin lyrics, but he would have to come in and clarify. I could also see a choral director teaching singers to still sing English lyrics with “pure vowels” for one reason or another. Pianodave?
Doesn’t sound “lazy” at all. Everyone working seriously to master a foreign language has to work on beating back the phonetic habits of their native language. Sounds like you are giving it an earnest go.
That said, a person falling back on their native phonetics is not “lazy” or somehow morally wrong or something. It is totally natural, and is something that has to be worked on assiduously to merely lessen one’s foreign accent. That’s why I’ve taken care to put “lazy” in quotes – to indicate the imprecise, but common, use of the word in this context by laymen.
I don’t have time to expound at length, but the natural state of all human language it to simplify and take shortcuts over time. Counterintuitively, since natural human language is not pre-planned, these simplifications can lead right back to further phonetic complexities. There are good comparisons to be made between the way individual human languages churn and change and, say, plate tectonics (where plates collide, raise sharp jagged mountains, which are eroded down to smooth hills, rinse, repeat).
All languages have phonetically simplified in some ways over time. Since you pointed out the Romance languages, I’d like to note that French has famously undergone wholesale phonetic simplification since the days of Vulgar Latin. French was also, before modern media, trending away from polysyllabic words and towards monosyllables (Martin Harris outlines this on pp 234-35 of The World’s Major Languages). Over time, with the concurrent trend of shedding of the Latinate synthetic grammar, a more-monosyllabic French language could have been gradually turning into an isolating language with many similarities to languages like Chinese.
bordelonde, I was actually addressing OP directly, those passages cited in your post, which I cited for truth, forgetting to say so.
FTR, I am B.Mused from conservatory in choral conducting and have worked with choirs from little old ladies in synagogues to annual performances of a mob at Carnegie. For which I bought a tuxedo, still hanging in my closet to smirk at me.
No worries … thanks for clarifying.
Thanks Leo, we apparently share some similar background. When you mention old ladies in synagogue, I’d be curious to know which one…we might know some of the same people.
I do mostly liturgical music (hebrew, Latin, some Spanish, French, and Yiddish) so we are very careful to pronounce the words accurately. To make sure Halleluyah comes out Hah-leh-loo-yah as opposed to Hal (think the movie Shallow Hal) LAY-lew-yuh. In singing, pronunciation and proper diction is key. You don’t want to sound like a choir full of fifth graders. Also, audiences pick up on proper diction and it makes them think in the back of their minds, “Wow, these people really rehearsed!”. It’s important that it doesn’t sound like a bunch of people reading the notes. I understand that maybe lazy isn’t the appropriate term, but I would posit that English does not cherish the pure vowel sound (think art song or bel canto). Whether this is “ugly” or not is up for debate. But nobody wants to hear a diphthong as an audience member. It’s grating, especially in choral music. Unless you are singing Oklahoma or Annie Get Your Gun, where the dialect is very relaxed, it’s generally frowned upon to include diphthongs in most choral singing.
It’s not at all uncommon to demand more Romance Language diction for songs in English.
But I still think English is a lazy language because your mouth does not work as hard as other languages, to hold the correct positions. Compare it to German, which I feel is a difficult language because those umlauts are not found in many other languages! I wonder how native Germans feel about it, having umlauted all their lives. I must be speaking only from my provincial northeast experience.
Thank you for all your responses!
For 1, English has plenty of homophones too. If a speaker was somehow unable to replicate the correct pitches, it would probably sound like a severe lisp, but it’s probably incredibly rare to have complex sentences with multiple sensible meanings from pitch variation alone.
English pseudo-homophonic sentences might be “I ate a squid”
“Aye, eight as quid” (which are both a stretch, but I didn’t spend much time)
Depending on the context the listener would probably be able to tell which you meant. If someone asked “What happened when you fell overboard?” the first sentence (though odd) might be applicable. If someone asked “Is that eight pounds?” the second sentence might be applicable (way more of a stretch) but you get the point. Even if there are multiple complete interpretations of what is being said, there are rarely multiple interpretations including context.
Perspective, dude, perspective. I still have problems pronouncing the difference between ship, sheep, and cheap. And yes, sheet, cheat, and shit.
Not to mention a few others too.
It seems easy to you and “lazy” to you because you’ve pronounced it all your life and it is your native language! English IS hard for people who did not grow up with it. And heck, I’ve been taking English lessons since I was six.
Latin American countries (well, maybe not Mexico so much, but certainly South American countries) have had a lot of immigration as well, and immigrant names (which might be of Italian, Eastern European, Arab, etc. origin) don’t follow the rules of Spanish pronunciation either, so I can definitely see confusion about how to spell someome’s name coming up.
I know, I know! I’m trying. SD is where I can broaden my horizons.
So then, if English is not your native language, did you ever think your own language was comparatively harder or easier than others you heard as you grew older? I’m thinking about small Japanese children being taught to raise tone or drop tone to signify different words, German children being taught an umlaut, etc. Umlauts are not easy to handle, at least in my opinion. I am having trouble with understanding why diphthongs are hard for people? I would have thought it’s only hard because it’s something new, not because mechanically it’s harder.
I would also mention that I hate when people speak Spanish with an American twang…you know, “Comowe estahs” and “dawnday estah ehl banyo?”
I wonder if Spanish speakers hearing this “butchery” are put off like I am? I feel the language should be respected and spoken with as much authenticity as possible.
Consider that Japanese and German children actually DON’T have to be taught those aspects of their language – they acquire them naturally by virtue of growing up in their respective speech communities.
Two of the German vowels spelled with an umlaut (ö, ü) represent a type of sound called front rounded vowels (long values /ø/ and /y/, respectively). You are perceiving these as hard to produce because you didn’t learn them in your speech community as a toddler. No more, no less.
Diphthongs are hard for speakers of some languages for the same reason – those people grew up in speech communities without diphthongs. And so on for pretty much all varieties of speech sounds.
This is a personal impression to you, though. The vast majority of people are appreciative and understanding of people who attempt to speak a non-native language. What you’re describing is nothing more than an “accent”. Perhaps a strong one, but still an accent. Assuming an earnest attempt to communicate in the non-native language (no jest or contempt), why would one consider that off-putting butchery?
Consider your reaction when non-native English speakers speak to you. Many people have learned English well and do just fine, but surely you’ve run across someone who spoke halting English despite their best efforts. Did you feel put off then?
I am not trying to personally attack you. I am just asking you, as KarlGrenze did upthread, to consider it a matter of perspective … a perspective shaped by the speech communities in which we grew up.