more fun!

In the car, once reaching Arizona, I constantly heard 'cactuses' besides the true plural form, 'cacti'.

euoy.

Into the Abyss . . . It's a Small World

Tomorrow I leave for Disney World. Tomorrow I officially descend into American kitsch. If only Regina Spektor had an album called "American Kitsch". It would be like the cold war, only with music. Wish me luck kind fools. Hopefully, when I return I will have many fun and frightening stories of improper pronunciation and sheer cultural intolerance. This will be a whole new kind of culture shock. I'll let you know if I go through the four stages of acculturation.

Ashley, your pronunciation is correct!

Pronunciation Fun: Ashley's version

Or not so fun.

Being in Arizona can lead one to learn new Spanish words. My mom and gramma, however, are pronouncing them all wrong and it's driving me up the wall.

Examples:

La Quinta Inn. Michelle, you probably know the correct pronunciation of orthographic . I'm no expert on romance languages, but I'm pretty damn sure that it's [ki], not [kwI] (that's a large i...I don't have ipa characters right now). They are continuously saying 'La Qwinta'. No matter how many times I correct them, they roll their eyes and continue to say it incorrectly. The only satisfaction I get out of being right in the whole situation is mumbling 'Quinta' the correct way underneath my breath.

Secondly, again Michelle, correct me if I'm wrong....but they pronounce orthographic such as in Javelina, as [ʤ], rather than [h]. '[ʤ]avelina?!' Are you fucking kidding me? I just---I don't understand! And I don't even speak Spanish.

It makes me crave nicotine. How ridiculous is that? Craving cigarettes because people don't pronounce shit right? What's going on? Does this mean that I'm truly becoming a linguistics major? When I crave nicotine due to ridiculously wrong pronunciations?

Must be.

Pronunciation Fun?

Today, my mother asked me how to spell mañana. She had been saying it [mɪnænə], and thought the orthography was minyana. I found this both interesting and unfortunate all at the same time.

1) My mother's filter does not seem to pick up the front pure vowel [a]. I know that other English speakers have this same problem when learning Spanish.

2) My mother cannot talk. No, really, she had to do speech therapy as a child. She mispronounces everything, and this is very annoying for me. In my head, I begin to phonetically transcribe things she says.

3) After realizing why she was mispronouncing the word, I proceeded to stick my fingers in my mouth and show her the difference in tongue positions for the two vowels. She looked at me cross-eyed. I am a freak.

That's all. I found a summer job! I still miss everyone, and I was really sad when this all happened. I felt alone in my phonetics freakishness.

bye bye michelle. you will be greatly missed.

IPA Vowels

I found this amazing video on youtube. The poster disabled embedding, so you actually have to click the link to watch it. I really hope that I don't grow up to be like this woman.

IPA Vowels

gɛləsiˈ

Why does our alphabet suck? Some days, I wish I spoke Russian, just so I could write in cyrillic. It's like a code. I'd even settle for Finnish or Icelandic, even though their syntax pisses me off. I'm that big of a fan of the umlaut. I met a guy in Egypt named Søern. If I have children, maybe I'll give them a middle name with a bunch of fun characters. They'll be the envy of all budding phonologists. Think of it:

Phineas Ørn Pritchett: Ørn means eagle. That's way fucking cooler than 'eagle' any day. Plus his initials would be PØP! Way too cool for school. I bet he'd piss all of his teachers off. He'd have arguments with people about his middle name, because they'd say, "That's not your middle name, that's not even a letter." He would respond, "False, you don't speak Norwegian, do you?" Conversation over.

Anyways, I'm on your side Robbie. I'm throwing our alphabet out the window, and maybe I'll even change my name to something like Guðbjörg.

Über-Jealous

Just thought I would ask you guys: Do you have the same fetish for using characters and diacritics not found in English orthography? Oh, man. I do. I don't know what it is, but I LOVE the umlaut. It looks especially good on a capital letter, like in 'Ärtze' or 'Österreicher'. There is just something about it... when I write them on paper I take extra time to make them perfect, symmetrical dots. I also really enjoy ß. Therefore, I really enjoy such words as 'Großmütter'. You know what else is good? THORN. Hell yes. This is why Icelandic rocks so hard. They have æ, þ, ð, accents, and umlauts. I am so incredibly jealous. What I wouldn't give for my name to actually be Þor. Let's not forget about good 'ol ø. I had a Norwegian Sunday School teacher years ago named Pøtt. I didn't realize how cool that was at the time, and now I regret not knowing. å is pretty cool, too, though I don't know what it sounds like. Let's not forget about the characters of South America, ñ and ç. Both are good, but have nothing on the european ones. I don't know how many times I have written out Old English passages during class, purely because it was aesthetically pleasing. Words like 'eorþscrǣf' and 'siððan' ... oooh baby.

English is so lame. We don't have anything cool. Just letters. We get apostrophes, which isn't even special. We've got 'naïve', that's about it. And most people don't even spell it that way. Thanks a lot, Normans. King Arthur had a good thing goin'... dicks...

Am I alone in this?