What is the joke in this one? ¿Cuál es el chiste en este?
And what is the joke in this version? ¿Y cuál es el chiste en esta versión?
Are they the same joke? Why not ? :-) ¿Son el mismo chiste? Por qué no ? :-)
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92 Comments
I think it’s a ‘breaking the fourth wall’ joke. This request cannot be fulfilled by being read, and the dialogue looks a bit silly because of it. The cartoonist has acknowledged this to the reader by using the words ‘seeing the difference’ instead of ‘hearing the difference’.
I can’t comment on the Spanish version. I took French in high school.
The joke is subtly different in the two versions.
Baldo can’t hear the differences between the two pronunciations – common enough in language learning.
In the English version you also can’t see the difference between the two pronunciations – they’re both written as “Mexico” – so the reader is just as lost as Baldo.
In the Spanish version there is a visual distinction between the two – “Mexico” vs “México” (with an accent on the “e”). The reader can see a distinction, but Baldo can’t hear (or see) it.
The Spanish version has Baldo and his father saying different words… there’s an accent on the “e” in his father’s version, which is the Spanish spelling.
The thing is, the actual difference between the English and Spanish pronunciations is not on the accent; it’s in the pronunciation of the ‘x’.
@Powers that is what I thought, but when I was at the US Grand Prix, where Sergio Pérez was a huge draw of Mexican fans, I asked some why they were pronouncing it as in the US, with “Mex” like “ex.” I had been taught the “x” should be a “heh” sound. They said that is how they always pronounced it. So maybe regional variations? Changing language under influence of the northern neighbor?
The Mexican ‘e’ already has a bit of an overtone change from the American ‘e’ in Mexico, especially when preparing for the ‘x’, and without knowing how Mexico was spelled in Spanish, I had not been getting all the way to ‘é’. Going through the 3 sounds on my FrequenSee app :-) , I see that the change in overtones has addition(s) and removal(s); might be more of a challenge for some ear structures. Father and son might want to try a different pitch when this problem arises.
In honor of my mother’s side of the family, there’s also the pronunciation difference between “Prague” and “Praha.”
I remember that on the Yucatan peninsula, the letter “X” was generally equivalent to an “SH” sound. I know that this applied to pre-Spanish terms, but I seem to remember I sometimes heard people say “Méschiko”.
While the pronunciation of the “x” is indeed different in Spanish, the e is also pronounced differently — with more of a what we in the states would describe as a “long a” sound.
As in the difference between Andrea and Andréa which I constantly have to point out.
The i also has a different sound, it is like a long e sound.
Mexicans I have spoken to pronounce the “x” as a soft unvoiced velar sound, like a less-audible version of German “kh”.
What Carl said, and Kilby too. Some Spanish dialects sound as different as Alabama and Brooklyn.
In the newspaper on on the computer screen, there is no visible difference (in the English version). In Sergio’s kitchen, however, the difference should be very audible.
@Daniel J Drazen – Finnish? Also, your comment made me Google how to pronounce “Prague” and apparently I have been saying it wrong for decades.
I don’t know that it is necessarily wrong to pronounce it differently than the natives. After all, few Americans pronounce “Paris” as “Pah-ree”.
It took me a very long time to figure out what Susan’s “mispronunciation” could possibly be, but I finally decided that I’ve been influenced by the German spelling (“Prag“), and that she must be referring to an English vowel shift (perhaps a long “a” sound?)
P.S. @ Brian in StL – … few Americans pronounce “Paris” as “Pah-ree” …
And those that do usually call it “gay”.
P.P.S. @ Carl Fink – Apologies for the misguided e-mail a few days ago.
I guess we’re supposed to pronounce it “Prahg” but don’t the natives pronounce it “Praha”?
Sometimes we don’t just pronounce cities differently; we spell them differently. For example Wien or Vienna. Roma or Rome.
You people who don’t live anywhere near Boston probably don’t pronounce Massachusetts towns the way we do.
You say Quincy. We say Quinsy, like the disease. That’s how John Quincy Adams pronounced it.
You say Medford. We say Meffid.
You say Worcester. We say Woostah. (Woo as in Woof)
You say Revere. We say uhVEEah. (Just the slightest hint of an r at the start.)
You say Harvard. We say Havvid.
2) Re ‘Mexico’ vs ‘México’ is it as easy to keep ‘x’ vs Carl’s ‘kh’ if you honour the accented ‘é’?
3) José goes back home to visit family in Mexico. (Or México).
They ask him what life is like in the USA.
“It’s great” he says, “the people are so considerate – they even care if I have a good view when I go to the baseball game, or football.”
“They all stand and ask ‘José, can you see?'”
OOI, how do we all pronounce the first name ‘Xavier’?
I don’t know but I saw a Mercury Cougar with the license plate “Xavier”.
Mercury Cougar with the license plate “Xavier”.
A friend used to drive Lope The Vega
@MiB – these days you could probably get a replacement for the Cougar badge 3D printed and chrome painted, to complete the allusion.
My Mom said that if she ever wanted to buy a Plymouth Horizon she’d get a blue one and get a license plate that said “BEYOND”.
@ Mike P – In (American) English, an initial “X” is normally rendered as a “Z” sound (thus “zave-i-er“), but in German an “X” retains the “KS” sound (like in “fox”), even when the “X” occurs at the beginning of the word. Thus, a German “Xavier” would be pronounced “ksah-vee-er” (with a short, but extended “a”, or possibly “ksah-veer”). Similarly, in German “Xylophon” is pronounced “ksüh-low-fon” (and no, I’m not about to teach anyone here how to pronounce a German “ü”).
We do the same with an inital ‘X’. Mostly. So yes, ‘zylophone’, ‘zanthan gum’, ‘zenon’, ‘zander’ (as a shortening of Alexander. Where, interestingly, the ‘a’ after the ‘x’ changes from long to short). And Coleridge’s ‘Zanadu’.
But if one knows a name to be foreign, does one (should one?) attempt to render it ‘correctly’, or as closely as one can?
Personally I’ve always referred to the band leader as (with ‘ch’ like the Scottish ‘loch’) ‘chav-ee-ay’.
Place names are another mixed bag of inconsistencies. Unless I’m speaking in French I don’t pronounce Paris as ‘Paree’ or Brussels as ‘Bruxelles’ but I don’t (think I) Anglicise any other place names. Not even Ypres or Aix-en-Provence.
I’ve adopted ‘Beijing’ and ‘Kolkata’, but not adopted München or Wein. And Kyiv is a recent bit of education.
“… as a shortening of Alexander. Where, interestingly, the ‘a’ after the ‘x’ changes from long to short).”
The “a” in Alexander is never long. Ah leks aynder?
I’ve heard some people pronounce xylophone as “silliphone.” (English speakers.) I don’t know if there’s an etymological reason for this. Are there other wood words where the x is pronounced as s?
To me, it’s not “Ah” but a straight short ‘A’ in that name, like you could shorten it to “Al”. The case of the ‘x’ is interesting, because isn’t not just a “cks”, but always has a bit of a ‘z’ sound following. That makes the “Zander” shortening work.
Also, yes, the second ‘a’ is not long. To me, the two ‘a’ sounds are pretty much the same.
To me (and I’m pretty sure the majority of people in England) the two ‘a’ sounds are very not the same, and are very much, for example,
Alexarnder Armstrong.
Mike P I think the objections were not to your calling them different sounds, which they clearly are, but just to the label “long A” for one of them. For Americans at any rate, “long A” means the diphthong /ey/ – or more generally as we learned in elementary school, there is a long vowel when “it says its own name”.
@ MiB – “…“silliphone” …. I don’t know if there’s an etymological reason for this…”
It sounds like an intentional (or family) joke, but it might also indicate a hearing effect. The difference between the “Z” and “S” sound is relatively small (whether or not the consonant is “voiced” or “aspirated”). The chemical “xylene” is normally pronounced “zai-leen”, but replacing that with “sai-leen” doesn’t sound like much of a change.
I have met several Germans who could not distinguish between the (English) “V” and “W” sounds (compare “very well” to “wery vell“, and the meaning should be obvious). This was not a “hearing” problem, it’s simply that this difference does not exist in German (which has the “V” sound, although usually spelled with a “W”, but not the English “W” sound). This error, as well as confusing F/V (in “Life” and “Live“) is very common in Germans speaking English, even among highly educated and even professional speakers.
P.S. I once heard a German radio announcer talking about a “life concert“, and in the German synchronisation of Star Wars, there are several instances of “Darth Wader“. When I hear that, I always think of Anakin going fly fishing for trout.
Mike P I think the objections were not to your calling them different sounds, which they clearly are
Do you mean the two instances of ‘a’ in “Alexander”? If so, nothing clear about that. They are the same to me, and Wikitionary agrees for a lot of speakers (hopefully the characters will survive posting, if not there’s a link):
Mike P says ‘We have a gazebo. For some reason which escapes me we took to pronouncing the 1st 4 letters as in to stare or look, i.e. “gaze bo”. I’ve said to my wife that sooner or later someone will hear us and think we think that’s how it should be pronounced.’ The thread from November also has a comment from Daniel Drazen https://cidu.info/2021/11/06/saturday-morning-oys-november-6th-2021/#comment-96823 saying that pronunciation can be picked up from that same 1960 movie I was referencing.
PLUS that thread https://cidu.info/2021/11/06/saturday-morning-oys-november-6th-2021/ has the Mannequin on the Moon panel that led to those comments, with a nicely executed sketch of a gazebo with a half-dozen young men hanging out in it and a woman passerby saying to her friend the caption, “Gazebros”.
I don’t do the “ahnd” sound as in the audio clip. As mentioned, it sounds like a UK pronunciation. For me that syllable is the same the common American “and”.
@Kilby According to Google translate, it’s pronounced “Pra-ahg” (vowel sounds from the back of the mouth, slightly extended with a slight tonal drop on the second half of the sound – almost as if it were two syllables – and soft glottal stop on the “g”). I pronounced it “Prog” (vowel sounds from the middle/front of the mouth, no tonal drop, and a hard glottal stop on the “g”)
Susan, are you sure you mean glottal and not maybe velar?
My casual American pronunciation of Prague is simply a rhyme for frog.
@Brian in StL “I don’t do the “ahnd” sound as in the audio clip. As mentioned, it sounds like a UK pronunciation.”
Well, yes.
@Susan T-0 – a bit like the Spanish pronounciation of the ‘g’ in,for example, ‘pagés’?
For me, Prague has a different vowel sound than “frog”. I live in a part of the US that doesn’t have the “caught/cot” merger, so the vowel from the former is what I would have for the city.
‘“caught/cot” merger’?
‘“caught/cot” merger’?
Mike P, that’s just a term for a certain phonological feature of some varieties of regional American English. Those vowels merge and those two words (for example) are indistinguishable.
My faculty boss at my last job was from Southern Illinois, and is named Don. Our team visited a local school and reported back about contact with a teacher named Dawn. Don was pleased we found someone who shared his name! But was surprised when we mentioned she was a woman.
Not the same merger exactly, but there was a principal being honored whom we all knew as Ginny. The honorary street sign used her full name, Virginia. Don wondered aloud how Jenny could be a nickname for Virginia. We all said, Oh Ginny is quite normally a nickname for Virginia, and Don said, Exactly what I’m asking, how is Jenny like Virginia?
@Dana K, yes, velar, thank you for the correction. @Mike P, sort of? If you make the sound of a hard “g” there’s a puff of air that comes out of your mouth. For Prague, you end the “g” sound just before that puff of air is produced, if that makes any sense. (Please note that I’m not a linguist of any sort, and am going by what it sounds like to my admittedly old and grey ears).
@Mitch4. Thanks. For a small country the UK is home to a ludicrous number of regional accents, some so different as to render them incomprehensible. I used to work in London with a guy from Glasgow. If you spoke with him you’d say he was Scottish. If you had a better ear you’d probably pick up that he was from Gasgow, not Edinburgh. But he was completely comprehensible. We once took a business trip together, to Glasgow, and on our journey from the airport after landing there he was chatting to the taxi driver. By the time we got to the hotel I could no longer understand a word he was saying.
I watch a LOT of British shows (Shetland, other detective shows, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, etc.), and the captioning from YT can’t do a decent job on many of the dialects because it’s auto-generated; DVDs are much better at it. Australian shows, much the same.
I was once on a train in England, and some kids were talking; I asked what language they were speaking. ‘English’, was the response. I realized later it was probably Geordie.
I spent a few days with a Scottish friend, and I was able to understand her after a bit of conversation.
Obligatory Hot Fuzz:
Ha! That sequential “translation” bit is great.
Knowing about “the pin/pen merger” lets you provide an answer to the question “why do some dialects use the term inkpen?” .
“caught/cot” merger’?
It’s been explained elsewhere. I was for a long time a regular participant in the alt.usage.english usenet group and that was one of the common terms. If you even take one of those online dialect quizzes, that sort of question is likely to pop up as they try to figure out the geographic influence on your speech.
I just went through the NY Times quiz, and:
Question 12 of 25
Do you pronounce cot and caught the same?
I just did that quiz for a laugh
Interesting. Here’s mine:
The questions were in general great, with proper design for uncertainty and different kinds of “not applicable” and so on.
UNFORTUNATELY the one it picked to show my most-similar regions was “sneakers”, one where I did not find the right kind of “I use some of these terms for different things” answer. I answered “sneakers” but really that is for me just for the low-cut kind, not at all fancy, inexpensive, and often a single color. “Tennis shoes” are high-top, probably all-white, classy and expensive but not flashy. “Gym shoes” are almost all other kinds of trainers, except those for running which are “running shoes” and I think were not listed. And “trainers” while listed is something I never say and never hear or read outside of British TV. (I appeared to write it a few sentences back, but that was to avoid using any of the others when I needed a generic.)
I say Mary and marry the same, and merry differently. And that pattern was a choice! That’s an example of what I mean by saying this is clearly professional and well-designed.
Judging from what I have gleaned about you, the results from the quiz seem to have properly pegged your Florida origins, and it seems you have not assimilated to your Chicago environs. As for Mike P, being as he’s a Brit taking this for Americans quiz, it nevertheless gave pretty plausible results from the obviously lacking choices, highlighting the east coast areas that most copied the changes occurring in England to spoken English from our common start (rhoticity being the most obvious one). I’d say not bad, not bad at all….
(@larK: I took your invitation and edited out your intentional moderation trigger plus the preface. But the rest is happily approved.)
For unknown reasons, Mike’s sharing included the auxiliary maps for particularly salient items, but mine didn’t. However, I did see them. That’s why I went on about “sneakers” — that was the item that it said made me similar to NYC and … Yonkers?? I was going to say I have never even been to Yonkers, but thinking about it I may have passed thru there on the way to my friend in Larchmont. Anyhow, that was also an item where I didn’t feel that the multiple options stretched to cover my pattern, so it was odd that was the one it counted most salient.
In the spirit of openes and full discosure, my map (which won’t mean anything if my previous comment doesn’t come through — Mitch, I guss delte this too if you delete the previous one):
Oh, crap, that didn’t link my results, just the quiz as a whole — how did you guys do it to show your individual links (I thought the share link button would do it, but I was wrong; I hope it’s not, “manually save the picture, upload it to some common picture sharing service…”
I’d say my results were remarkably accurate, and that the highlighted “distinctive” answers were 2/3 nonsense (the same word (sneakers) for two different cities (Yonkers and New York), just like Mitch
Hmm, larK and Brian in STL, the images that come thru for both of you look identical, including two city selections. Are you sure you got the results map and not somehow the intro / cover page?
BTW Brian, thanks for introducing us to this interesting tool!
Sorry, stupid site, now I’ve lost the results, too. (Shoudl have just screen shotted it..)
Disregard my two attemps abve, and then disregart this, too…
larK I’ll grab your image and embed/post it.
Nope, sorry — just gives me a Page Not Found.
If you still have access to your results page, you could right-click on the map to save to your local device, then carry thru with the upload method.
… No, I see in the meantime you posted that you’ve lost contact with the results. Ah well, sorry.
@Mitch4 – the shoes one irked me as well. I think I went for trainers, but the question was fundamentally flawed as it was based on the premise that shoes to wear in a gym are the same as other athletic activities. And I’d like to know why “plimsolls” wasn’t an option.
But as a cultural insight it was interesting. Some things foxed me – I just couldn’t workout what was going on with “What do you call something that is across both streets from you at an intersection (or diagonally across from you in general)?”. Some intrigued – I had no idea that the day before Halloween was anything.
One was interesting as here in the UK it has connotations not only of location, but “class”. The ‘dinner’ vs ‘supper’ one. For me supper is a later meal than dinner, but either could be the main meal, or more main than the other, and there’s no difference in formality. But the differences would be far less nuanced further North, where, as used to be much more geographically widespread but much more rooted in “working class” language, it is still, AFAIK, fairly common that ‘dinner’ is eaten in the middle of the day, and the late afternoon/early evening meal is ‘tea’.
Jim Reeves was a Texan, and pronounced ‘Mary’ and ‘marry’ differently.
@Mike P – I noticed you are using an image upload/share site called Postimage, or at https://postimages.org/ . It looks to be free — is that correct, or is there a later fee for enhancements or something? And is the service useful / serviceable?
The reason I ask is probably obvious, as we regularly issue generic advice on how to embed images in comments when you can’t get the right kind of URL for a comic or other image you’d like to include within a comment. And the advice is to save to your local device then upload to a site where you can put it and get a good URL to use as link in a comment. But we haven’t made recommendation for any particular upload site.
I didn’t “share” my map – the URL didn’t look personalised – I did screenshots (2, to include the auxiliary maps).
larK – you can run the quiz again. You’ll find that some of the questions are different.
Okay, I joined Postimage free account and it looks all right, but the Premium option isn’t mentioned until you have signed in to the free one.
Hmm, larK and Brian in STL, the images that come thru for both of you look identical, including two city selections.
I was not attempting to post my results That didn’t occur to me. I put in the starting URL for the quiz in case people wanted to check it out. That’s the image for the base link before you take the quiz. I didn’t realize that it would do that. It’s never obvious to me when a link will do something like that versus just being a clickable URL.
The varying selection of questions can make a difference. One that does for me is the diagonally opposite question. I picked up “kitty-corner” during my childhood in Iowa, As it’s not a frequently-use phrase, I never lost it although some or all of my siblings say something else (I’m the oldest and we moved when I was eight or so). Unlike “pop”, which I said as a kid be changed to “soda” over time.
If kitty-corner is in the questions, it shifts my results north and throws an extra epicenter of Rockford Illinois.
Here’s a problematic question for me:
What do you call the small freshwater lobster often found in lakes and streams?
If referring to the wild animal, I’d call them “crawdads” as we did when I was a kid and lived in an apartment complex near a creek in OK. If referring to a culinary dish, I’d say “crawfish”.
I had some hesitation with the diagonal item. I say “kitty-corner” but will write (and kind of expect to read) “catercorner”. Because I think of that as the official spelling. If I were reading aloud from a text (and it wasn’t a tst … or linguistics survey) I would see “catercorner” and probably speak it as “kitty-corner”.
On a completed quiz, there is an area for sharing. One option is a link (chain symbol), which I think will work. I will try below.
That didn’t work, although pasting into a tab does. Let’s try a forced link:
@Mitch4 – yes, Postimage is free, or there’s a “Premium” service which allows larger images (if 24MB isn’t enough), higher resolution (ditto 1280px), and is ad-free.
The free service can be used anonymously (i.e. you don’t need even a free “account”), but without signing up you’ll never be able to find anything you uploaded in the past unless you keep your own records of the URLs. For ephemeral use like putting screenshots in posts here that doesn’t matter – I’ve not got an account.
You can “crossload” from other websites but IIRC occasionally some sites see that as a hotlink to be blocked..
It has a neat tool you can download (Windoze) which will let you do screenshots, do basic editing/annotating, upload it and get the link back, or upload a local image via a right-click context menu in file explorer.
Image links are available in a number of different “bulletin board” formats, such as phpBB, direct images, thumbnails, etc.
Overall, I like it, it meets my needs well, but those needs do not include galleries, slide-shows etc.
Wow, so cot/caught registers as Rockford and Aurora?
(Maybe…) embedding Brian’s main map image:
Thanks, MikeP.
Here I’m using the Windows app in screenshot mode to capture Brian’s full page of results.
OK, I hope this will be the last try (using Brian’s forced link method):
(When I did it a second time, I second guessed myself with some of the answers, things I’ve learned to say differently because of the reaction I’d get if I said what I grew up with, and I got a different, less satisfactory map; so this third time I forced myself to give the “original” answers to get a more “authentic” map… “Hoagie” was the big differentiator: I don’t really say it anymore, I would say a “sub”, but to my mind, “hoagie” is the Ur-word. I think I would say firefly over lightning bug nowadays, but I don’t often say either, and I know it was lightning bug growing up… I think I would say “diagonal”, but in my mind I hear kitty-corner…)
Lightning bug, firefly,…..
….. or glow worm?
@Brian in STL – actually that one wasn’t problematic for me at all – ‘crayfish’ in any situation. (Scampi vs Dublin Bay prawn vs Norway lobster, OTOH….)
“Small” made me smile a bit
On the left a UK native crayfish, on the right an American signal crayfish – classed as an invasive species here, and doing damage. I read an amusing news report a few years ago where the (whatever the govt dept responsible for environmental issues was called at the time) had a campaign to try and eradicate the signal crayfish in an area, and were paying a bounty for people to catch them. One commercial fisherman was doing very nicely – already trapping them and selling them to restaurants he was suddenly being paid a second time by the govt for the same animals.
“pop” used to be the word here when I was growing up. The question in the quiz struck me as odd as it implied that “lemonade” and”coke” are generic terms for any carbonated soft drink, irrespective of whether it is actually lemonade or cola.
I don’t know about “lemonade” getting used that non-specifically, but I think “coke” for even non-cola pop drinks is pretty well attested. And maybe especially near Atlanta, home of the Co’Cola company.
‘twould be funnier to use it in Purchase,NY.
@Mitch4 ““Tennis shoes” are high-top, probably all-white, classy and expensive but not flashy.”
The first “designer” tennis shoes were definitely flashy.
And then there are basketball shoes. Easy test – is the brand or line named for a basketball player?
Was “pumps” on the list?
With the crawdad bounty, I’d wonder if anyone started raising them.
I doubt that the rewards were worth the risks attendant on committing criminal acts in order to get public funding to deal with the results of them.
Yes, there are places where this is a reasonable and common exchange:
W: And what would you like to drink?
D: A coke.
W: What kind?
D: Coke.
“Lemonade” as generic I associate with the UK though.
(I tried the quiz. It told me I’m from Boston. Shocking.)
I tried the quiz, too: it told me that I might be from a number of places, none of which I’ve ever actually lived in, or even visited. However, resided in several different locations with in the continental US (each of them separated by at least 1000 miles from the others), I often had trouble picking a single answer from the available options (such as “firefly” vs. “lightning bug”). And, now, having lived in Germany for nearly three decades, there’s probably a subconcious “normalization” effect that tends to reduce any specific American regionalisms.
@DiB – don’t think I’ve ever encountered “lemonade” being used as a generic term for a soft drink.
Comics I Don't Understand 
I think it’s a ‘breaking the fourth wall’ joke. This request cannot be fulfilled by being read, and the dialogue looks a bit silly because of it. The cartoonist has acknowledged this to the reader by using the words ‘seeing the difference’ instead of ‘hearing the difference’.
I can’t comment on the Spanish version. I took French in high school.
The joke is subtly different in the two versions.
Baldo can’t hear the differences between the two pronunciations – common enough in language learning.
In the English version you also can’t see the difference between the two pronunciations – they’re both written as “Mexico” – so the reader is just as lost as Baldo.
In the Spanish version there is a visual distinction between the two – “Mexico” vs “México” (with an accent on the “e”). The reader can see a distinction, but Baldo can’t hear (or see) it.
The Spanish version has Baldo and his father saying different words… there’s an accent on the “e” in his father’s version, which is the Spanish spelling.
The thing is, the actual difference between the English and Spanish pronunciations is not on the accent; it’s in the pronunciation of the ‘x’.
@Powers that is what I thought, but when I was at the US Grand Prix, where Sergio Pérez was a huge draw of Mexican fans, I asked some why they were pronouncing it as in the US, with “Mex” like “ex.” I had been taught the “x” should be a “heh” sound. They said that is how they always pronounced it. So maybe regional variations? Changing language under influence of the northern neighbor?
The Mexican ‘e’ already has a bit of an overtone change from the American ‘e’ in Mexico, especially when preparing for the ‘x’, and without knowing how Mexico was spelled in Spanish, I had not been getting all the way to ‘é’. Going through the 3 sounds on my FrequenSee app :-) , I see that the change in overtones has addition(s) and removal(s); might be more of a challenge for some ear structures. Father and son might want to try a different pitch when this problem arises.
In honor of my mother’s side of the family, there’s also the pronunciation difference between “Prague” and “Praha.”
I remember that on the Yucatan peninsula, the letter “X” was generally equivalent to an “SH” sound. I know that this applied to pre-Spanish terms, but I seem to remember I sometimes heard people say “Méschiko”.
While the pronunciation of the “x” is indeed different in Spanish, the e is also pronounced differently — with more of a what we in the states would describe as a “long a” sound.
As in the difference between Andrea and Andréa which I constantly have to point out.
The i also has a different sound, it is like a long e sound.
Mexicans I have spoken to pronounce the “x” as a soft unvoiced velar sound, like a less-audible version of German “kh”.
What Carl said, and Kilby too. Some Spanish dialects sound as different as Alabama and Brooklyn.
In the newspaper on on the computer screen, there is no visible difference (in the English version). In Sergio’s kitchen, however, the difference should be very audible.
@Daniel J Drazen – Finnish? Also, your comment made me Google how to pronounce “Prague” and apparently I have been saying it wrong for decades.
I don’t know that it is necessarily wrong to pronounce it differently than the natives. After all, few Americans pronounce “Paris” as “Pah-ree”.
It took me a very long time to figure out what Susan’s “mispronunciation” could possibly be, but I finally decided that I’ve been influenced by the German spelling (“Prag“), and that she must be referring to an English vowel shift (perhaps a long “a” sound?)
P.S. @ Brian in StL – … few Americans pronounce “Paris” as “Pah-ree” …
And those that do usually call it “gay”.
P.P.S. @ Carl Fink – Apologies for the misguided e-mail a few days ago.
I guess we’re supposed to pronounce it “Prahg” but don’t the natives pronounce it “Praha”?
Sometimes we don’t just pronounce cities differently; we spell them differently. For example Wien or Vienna. Roma or Rome.
You people who don’t live anywhere near Boston probably don’t pronounce Massachusetts towns the way we do.
You say Quincy. We say Quinsy, like the disease. That’s how John Quincy Adams pronounced it.
You say Medford. We say Meffid.
You say Worcester. We say Woostah. (Woo as in Woof)
You say Revere. We say uhVEEah. (Just the slightest hint of an r at the start.)
You say Harvard. We say Havvid.
A few points:
1) https://teachmykidsspanish.com/why-do-some-people-speak-spanish-with-a-lisp
2) Re ‘Mexico’ vs ‘México’ is it as easy to keep ‘x’ vs Carl’s ‘kh’ if you honour the accented ‘é’?
3) José goes back home to visit family in Mexico. (Or México).
They ask him what life is like in the USA.
“It’s great” he says, “the people are so considerate – they even care if I have a good view when I go to the baseball game, or football.”
“They all stand and ask ‘José, can you see?'”
OOI, how do we all pronounce the first name ‘Xavier’?
I don’t know but I saw a Mercury Cougar with the license plate “Xavier”.
Mercury Cougar with the license plate “Xavier”.A friend used to drive Lope The Vega
@MiB – these days you could probably get a replacement for the Cougar badge 3D printed and chrome painted, to complete the allusion.
My Mom said that if she ever wanted to buy a Plymouth Horizon she’d get a blue one and get a license plate that said “BEYOND”.
@ Mike P – In (American) English, an initial “X” is normally rendered as a “Z” sound (thus “zave-i-er“), but in German an “X” retains the “KS” sound (like in “fox”), even when the “X” occurs at the beginning of the word. Thus, a German “Xavier” would be pronounced “ksah-vee-er” (with a short, but extended “a”, or possibly “ksah-veer”). Similarly, in German “Xylophon” is pronounced “ksüh-low-fon” (and no, I’m not about to teach anyone here how to pronounce a German “ü”).
We do the same with an inital ‘X’. Mostly. So yes, ‘zylophone’, ‘zanthan gum’, ‘zenon’, ‘zander’ (as a shortening of Alexander. Where, interestingly, the ‘a’ after the ‘x’ changes from long to short). And Coleridge’s ‘Zanadu’.
But if one knows a name to be foreign, does one (should one?) attempt to render it ‘correctly’, or as closely as one can?
Personally I’ve always referred to the band leader as (with ‘ch’ like the Scottish ‘loch’) ‘chav-ee-ay’.
Place names are another mixed bag of inconsistencies. Unless I’m speaking in French I don’t pronounce Paris as ‘Paree’ or Brussels as ‘Bruxelles’ but I don’t (think I) Anglicise any other place names. Not even Ypres or Aix-en-Provence.
I’ve adopted ‘Beijing’ and ‘Kolkata’, but not adopted München or Wein. And Kyiv is a recent bit of education.
“… as a shortening of Alexander. Where, interestingly, the ‘a’ after the ‘x’ changes from long to short).”
The “a” in Alexander is never long. Ah leks aynder?
I’ve heard some people pronounce xylophone as “silliphone.” (English speakers.) I don’t know if there’s an etymological reason for this. Are there other wood words where the x is pronounced as s?
To me, it’s not “Ah” but a straight short ‘A’ in that name, like you could shorten it to “Al”. The case of the ‘x’ is interesting, because isn’t not just a “cks”, but always has a bit of a ‘z’ sound following. That makes the “Zander” shortening work.
Also, yes, the second ‘a’ is not long. To me, the two ‘a’ sounds are pretty much the same.
To me (and I’m pretty sure the majority of people in England) the two ‘a’ sounds are very not the same, and are very much, for example,
Alexarnder Armstrong.
Mike P I think the objections were not to your calling them different sounds, which they clearly are, but just to the label “long A” for one of them. For Americans at any rate, “long A” means the diphthong /ey/ – or more generally as we learned in elementary school, there is a long vowel when “it says its own name”.
@ MiB – “…“silliphone” …. I don’t know if there’s an etymological reason for this…”
It sounds like an intentional (or family) joke, but it might also indicate a hearing effect. The difference between the “Z” and “S” sound is relatively small (whether or not the consonant is “voiced” or “aspirated”). The chemical “xylene” is normally pronounced “zai-leen”, but replacing that with “sai-leen” doesn’t sound like much of a change.
I have met several Germans who could not distinguish between the (English) “V” and “W” sounds (compare “very well” to “wery vell“, and the meaning should be obvious). This was not a “hearing” problem, it’s simply that this difference does not exist in German (which has the “V” sound, although usually spelled with a “W”, but not the English “W” sound). This error, as well as confusing F/V (in “Life” and “Live“) is very common in Germans speaking English, even among highly educated and even professional speakers.
P.S. I once heard a German radio announcer talking about a “life concert“, and in the German synchronisation of Star Wars, there are several instances of “Darth Wader“. When I hear that, I always think of Anakin going fly fishing for trout.
Mike P I think the objections were not to your calling them different sounds, which they clearly are
Do you mean the two instances of ‘a’ in “Alexander”? If so, nothing clear about that. They are the same to me, and Wikitionary agrees for a lot of speakers (hopefully the characters will survive posting, if not there’s a link):
(General American) IPA(key): /ˌæ.lɨɡˈzæn.dɚ/
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Alexander#Pronunciation
æ.lɨɡˈzɑːn.də for me.
[audio src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/LL-Q1860_%28eng%29-Vealhurl-Alexander.wav" /]
@Kilby: “It sounds like an intentional (or family) joke”
Perilous things. We have a gazebo. For some reason which escapes me we took to pronouncing the 1st 4 letters as in to stare or look, i.e. “gaze bo”.
I’ve said to my wife that sooner or later someone will hear us and think we think that’s how it should be pronounced.
Thanks for the audio clip, pronouncing Alexander. This is clearly some English accent, not American, maybe RP.
The two places where there is an orthographic A are indeed two different sounds. Your transcription æ.lɨɡˈzɑːn.də looks good.
I don’t know what term in common usage is available for the vowel sound in the third syllable, the zɑ . Maybe “broad A”. But absolutely not “long A”!
On “gazebo” — I started to write out an anecdote about how I confused this with “placebo”; but can just link to https://cidu.info/2021/11/06/saturday-morning-oys-november-6th-2021/#comment-96827 where I did it previously.
Mike P says ‘We have a gazebo. For some reason which escapes me we took to pronouncing the 1st 4 letters as in to stare or look, i.e. “gaze bo”. I’ve said to my wife that sooner or later someone will hear us and think we think that’s how it should be pronounced.’ The thread from November also has a comment from Daniel Drazen https://cidu.info/2021/11/06/saturday-morning-oys-november-6th-2021/#comment-96823 saying that pronunciation can be picked up from that same 1960 movie I was referencing.
PLUS that thread https://cidu.info/2021/11/06/saturday-morning-oys-november-6th-2021/ has the Mannequin on the Moon panel that led to those comments, with a nicely executed sketch of a gazebo with a half-dozen young men hanging out in it and a woman passerby saying to her friend the caption, “Gazebros”.
(And here’s a show tune on that latter theme:)
https://youtu.be/22PoWMIWn7E
I don’t do the “ahnd” sound as in the audio clip. As mentioned, it sounds like a UK pronunciation. For me that syllable is the same the common American “and”.
@Kilby According to Google translate, it’s pronounced “Pra-ahg” (vowel sounds from the back of the mouth, slightly extended with a slight tonal drop on the second half of the sound – almost as if it were two syllables – and soft glottal stop on the “g”). I pronounced it “Prog” (vowel sounds from the middle/front of the mouth, no tonal drop, and a hard glottal stop on the “g”)
Susan, are you sure you mean glottal and not maybe velar?
My casual American pronunciation of Prague is simply a rhyme for frog.
Thanks to Susan for following up for the sake of my instatiable curtiosity. I cannot say anything about the “correct” pronunciation of the English transcription, but the typical German spelling & pronunciation (of “Prag“) comes close to the way you wrote it. According to Wikipedia, the Czech pronunciation is very close to the original spelling (“Praha“). Let’s see if WordPress is willing to embed an “.ogg” file:
[audio src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Cs-Praha.ogg" /]
@Brian in StL “I don’t do the “ahnd” sound as in the audio clip. As mentioned, it sounds like a UK pronunciation.”
Well, yes.
@Susan T-0 – a bit like the Spanish pronounciation of the ‘g’ in,for example, ‘pagés’?
For me, Prague has a different vowel sound than “frog”. I live in a part of the US that doesn’t have the “caught/cot” merger, so the vowel from the former is what I would have for the city.
‘“caught/cot” merger’?
‘“caught/cot” merger’?
Mike P, that’s just a term for a certain phonological feature of some varieties of regional American English. Those vowels merge and those two words (for example) are indistinguishable.
My faculty boss at my last job was from Southern Illinois, and is named Don. Our team visited a local school and reported back about contact with a teacher named Dawn. Don was pleased we found someone who shared his name! But was surprised when we mentioned she was a woman.
Not the same merger exactly, but there was a principal being honored whom we all knew as Ginny. The honorary street sign used her full name, Virginia. Don wondered aloud how Jenny could be a nickname for Virginia. We all said, Oh Ginny is quite normally a nickname for Virginia, and Don said, Exactly what I’m asking, how is Jenny like Virginia?
@Dana K, yes, velar, thank you for the correction. @Mike P, sort of? If you make the sound of a hard “g” there’s a puff of air that comes out of your mouth. For Prague, you end the “g” sound just before that puff of air is produced, if that makes any sense. (Please note that I’m not a linguist of any sort, and am going by what it sounds like to my admittedly old and grey ears).
@Mitch4. Thanks. For a small country the UK is home to a ludicrous number of regional accents, some so different as to render them incomprehensible. I used to work in London with a guy from Glasgow. If you spoke with him you’d say he was Scottish. If you had a better ear you’d probably pick up that he was from Gasgow, not Edinburgh. But he was completely comprehensible. We once took a business trip together, to Glasgow, and on our journey from the airport after landing there he was chatting to the taxi driver. By the time we got to the hotel I could no longer understand a word he was saying.
I watch a LOT of British shows (Shetland, other detective shows, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, etc.), and the captioning from YT can’t do a decent job on many of the dialects because it’s auto-generated; DVDs are much better at it. Australian shows, much the same.
I was once on a train in England, and some kids were talking; I asked what language they were speaking. ‘English’, was the response. I realized later it was probably Geordie.
I spent a few days with a Scottish friend, and I was able to understand her after a bit of conversation.
Obligatory Hot Fuzz:
Ha! That sequential “translation” bit is great.
Knowing about “the pin/pen merger” lets you provide an answer to the question “why do some dialects use the term inkpen?” .
“caught/cot” merger’?
It’s been explained elsewhere. I was for a long time a regular participant in the alt.usage.english usenet group and that was one of the common terms. If you even take one of those online dialect quizzes, that sort of question is likely to pop up as they try to figure out the geographic influence on your speech.
I just went through the NY Times quiz, and:
Question 12 of 25
Do you pronounce cot and caught the same?
I just did that quiz for a laugh
Interesting. Here’s mine:
The questions were in general great, with proper design for uncertainty and different kinds of “not applicable” and so on.
UNFORTUNATELY the one it picked to show my most-similar regions was “sneakers”, one where I did not find the right kind of “I use some of these terms for different things” answer. I answered “sneakers” but really that is for me just for the low-cut kind, not at all fancy, inexpensive, and often a single color. “Tennis shoes” are high-top, probably all-white, classy and expensive but not flashy. “Gym shoes” are almost all other kinds of trainers, except those for running which are “running shoes” and I think were not listed. And “trainers” while listed is something I never say and never hear or read outside of British TV. (I appeared to write it a few sentences back, but that was to avoid using any of the others when I needed a generic.)
I say Mary and marry the same, and merry differently. And that pattern was a choice! That’s an example of what I mean by saying this is clearly professional and well-designed.
Judging from what I have gleaned about you, the results from the quiz seem to have properly pegged your Florida origins, and it seems you have not assimilated to your Chicago environs. As for Mike P, being as he’s a Brit taking this for Americans quiz, it nevertheless gave pretty plausible results from the obviously lacking choices, highlighting the east coast areas that most copied the changes occurring in England to spoken English from our common start (rhoticity being the most obvious one). I’d say not bad, not bad at all….
(@larK: I took your invitation and edited out your intentional moderation trigger plus the preface. But the rest is happily approved.)
For unknown reasons, Mike’s sharing included the auxiliary maps for particularly salient items, but mine didn’t. However, I did see them. That’s why I went on about “sneakers” — that was the item that it said made me similar to NYC and … Yonkers?? I was going to say I have never even been to Yonkers, but thinking about it I may have passed thru there on the way to my friend in Larchmont. Anyhow, that was also an item where I didn’t feel that the multiple options stretched to cover my pattern, so it was odd that was the one it counted most salient.
In the spirit of openes and full discosure, my map (which won’t mean anything if my previous comment doesn’t come through — Mitch, I guss delte this too if you delete the previous one):
Oh, crap, that didn’t link my results, just the quiz as a whole — how did you guys do it to show your individual links (I thought the share link button would do it, but I was wrong; I hope it’s not, “manually save the picture, upload it to some common picture sharing service…”
I’d say my results were remarkably accurate, and that the highlighted “distinctive” answers were 2/3 nonsense (the same word (sneakers) for two different cities (Yonkers and New York), just like Mitch
My map (?):
blob:https://www.nytimes.com/055045f8-b6ac-494c-8c44-1cbf6843f0a0
Hmm, larK and Brian in STL, the images that come thru for both of you look identical, including two city selections. Are you sure you got the results map and not somehow the intro / cover page?
BTW Brian, thanks for introducing us to this interesting tool!
Sorry, stupid site, now I’ve lost the results, too. (Shoudl have just screen shotted it..)
Disregard my two attemps abve, and then disregart this, too…
larK I’ll grab your image and embed/post it.
Nope, sorry — just gives me a Page Not Found.
If you still have access to your results page, you could right-click on the map to save to your local device, then carry thru with the upload method.
… No, I see in the meantime you posted that you’ve lost contact with the results. Ah well, sorry.
@Mitch4 – the shoes one irked me as well. I think I went for trainers, but the question was fundamentally flawed as it was based on the premise that shoes to wear in a gym are the same as other athletic activities. And I’d like to know why “plimsolls” wasn’t an option.
But as a cultural insight it was interesting. Some things foxed me – I just couldn’t workout what was going on with “What do you call something that is across both streets from you at an intersection (or diagonally across from you in general)?”. Some intrigued – I had no idea that the day before Halloween was anything.
One was interesting as here in the UK it has connotations not only of location, but “class”. The ‘dinner’ vs ‘supper’ one. For me supper is a later meal than dinner, but either could be the main meal, or more main than the other, and there’s no difference in formality. But the differences would be far less nuanced further North, where, as used to be much more geographically widespread but much more rooted in “working class” language, it is still, AFAIK, fairly common that ‘dinner’ is eaten in the middle of the day, and the late afternoon/early evening meal is ‘tea’.
Jim Reeves was a Texan, and pronounced ‘Mary’ and ‘marry’ differently.
@Mike P – I noticed you are using an image upload/share site called Postimage, or at https://postimages.org/ . It looks to be free — is that correct, or is there a later fee for enhancements or something? And is the service useful / serviceable?
The reason I ask is probably obvious, as we regularly issue generic advice on how to embed images in comments when you can’t get the right kind of URL for a comic or other image you’d like to include within a comment. And the advice is to save to your local device then upload to a site where you can put it and get a good URL to use as link in a comment. But we haven’t made recommendation for any particular upload site.
I didn’t “share” my map – the URL didn’t look personalised – I did screenshots (2, to include the auxiliary maps).
larK – you can run the quiz again. You’ll find that some of the questions are different.
Okay, I joined Postimage free account and it looks all right, but the Premium option isn’t mentioned until you have signed in to the free one.
Hmm, larK and Brian in STL, the images that come thru for both of you look identical, including two city selections.
I was not attempting to post my results That didn’t occur to me. I put in the starting URL for the quiz in case people wanted to check it out. That’s the image for the base link before you take the quiz. I didn’t realize that it would do that. It’s never obvious to me when a link will do something like that versus just being a clickable URL.
The varying selection of questions can make a difference. One that does for me is the diagonally opposite question. I picked up “kitty-corner” during my childhood in Iowa, As it’s not a frequently-use phrase, I never lost it although some or all of my siblings say something else (I’m the oldest and we moved when I was eight or so). Unlike “pop”, which I said as a kid be changed to “soda” over time.
If kitty-corner is in the questions, it shifts my results north and throws an extra epicenter of Rockford Illinois.
Here’s a problematic question for me:
What do you call the small freshwater lobster often found in lakes and streams?
If referring to the wild animal, I’d call them “crawdads” as we did when I was a kid and lived in an apartment complex near a creek in OK. If referring to a culinary dish, I’d say “crawfish”.
I had some hesitation with the diagonal item. I say “kitty-corner” but will write (and kind of expect to read) “catercorner”. Because I think of that as the official spelling. If I were reading aloud from a text (and it wasn’t a tst … or linguistics survey) I would see “catercorner” and probably speak it as “kitty-corner”.
On a completed quiz, there is an area for sharing. One option is a link (chain symbol), which I think will work. I will try below.
That didn’t work, although pasting into a tab does. Let’s try a forced link:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz-map.html?r=0242489044020060101020402000010084000k8000020j0000
@Mitch4 – yes, Postimage is free, or there’s a “Premium” service which allows larger images (if 24MB isn’t enough), higher resolution (ditto 1280px), and is ad-free.
The free service can be used anonymously (i.e. you don’t need even a free “account”), but without signing up you’ll never be able to find anything you uploaded in the past unless you keep your own records of the URLs. For ephemeral use like putting screenshots in posts here that doesn’t matter – I’ve not got an account.
You can “crossload” from other websites but IIRC occasionally some sites see that as a hotlink to be blocked..
It has a neat tool you can download (Windoze) which will let you do screenshots, do basic editing/annotating, upload it and get the link back, or upload a local image via a right-click context menu in file explorer.
Image links are available in a number of different “bulletin board” formats, such as phpBB, direct images, thumbnails, etc.
Overall, I like it, it meets my needs well, but those needs do not include galleries, slide-shows etc.
Wow, so cot/caught registers as Rockford and Aurora?
(Maybe…) embedding Brian’s main map image:
Thanks, MikeP.
Here I’m using the Windows app in screenshot mode to capture Brian’s full page of results.
OK, I hope this will be the last try (using Brian’s forced link method):
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz-map.html?r=020k40p10400104j10000000l0000080820011802002020100
(When I did it a second time, I second guessed myself with some of the answers, things I’ve learned to say differently because of the reaction I’d get if I said what I grew up with, and I got a different, less satisfactory map; so this third time I forced myself to give the “original” answers to get a more “authentic” map… “Hoagie” was the big differentiator: I don’t really say it anymore, I would say a “sub”, but to my mind, “hoagie” is the Ur-word. I think I would say firefly over lightning bug nowadays, but I don’t often say either, and I know it was lightning bug growing up… I think I would say “diagonal”, but in my mind I hear kitty-corner…)
Lightning bug, firefly,…..
….. or glow worm?
@Brian in STL – actually that one wasn’t problematic for me at all – ‘crayfish’ in any situation. (Scampi vs Dublin Bay prawn vs Norway lobster, OTOH….)
“Small” made me smile a bit
On the left a UK native crayfish, on the right an American signal crayfish – classed as an invasive species here, and doing damage. I read an amusing news report a few years ago where the (whatever the govt dept responsible for environmental issues was called at the time) had a campaign to try and eradicate the signal crayfish in an area, and were paying a bounty for people to catch them. One commercial fisherman was doing very nicely – already trapping them and selling them to restaurants he was suddenly being paid a second time by the govt for the same animals.
“pop” used to be the word here when I was growing up. The question in the quiz struck me as odd as it implied that “lemonade” and”coke” are generic terms for any carbonated soft drink, irrespective of whether it is actually lemonade or cola.
I don’t know about “lemonade” getting used that non-specifically, but I think “coke” for even non-cola pop drinks is pretty well attested. And maybe especially near Atlanta, home of the Co’Cola company.
‘twould be funnier to use it in Purchase,NY.
@Mitch4 ““Tennis shoes” are high-top, probably all-white, classy and expensive but not flashy.”
The first “designer” tennis shoes were definitely flashy.
And then there are basketball shoes. Easy test – is the brand or line named for a basketball player?
Was “pumps” on the list?
With the crawdad bounty, I’d wonder if anyone started raising them.
I doubt that the rewards were worth the risks attendant on committing criminal acts in order to get public funding to deal with the results of them.
Yes, there are places where this is a reasonable and common exchange:
W: And what would you like to drink?
D: A coke.
W: What kind?
D: Coke.
“Lemonade” as generic I associate with the UK though.
(I tried the quiz. It told me I’m from Boston. Shocking.)
I tried the quiz, too: it told me that I might be from a number of places, none of which I’ve ever actually lived in, or even visited. However, resided in several different locations with in the continental US (each of them separated by at least 1000 miles from the others), I often had trouble picking a single answer from the available options (such as “firefly” vs. “lightning bug”). And, now, having lived in Germany for nearly three decades, there’s probably a subconcious “normalization” effect that tends to reduce any specific American regionalisms.
@DiB – don’t think I’ve ever encountered “lemonade” being used as a generic term for a soft drink.