UKC

Why is it that different parts of UKC can cope with accents and others can't?

The Vend£e Globe
The Vendée Globe
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Le Fantôme de l'Opéra


The Vend£e Globe
The Vend£e Globe
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Le Fant£me de l'Op£ra

In reply to jon:

I spent ages googling how to do that bloody accent too.

In reply to jon:

from my perspective as being mono lingual for the first half of my life, then trying to learn languages. I think it is certain letter combinations, vowel sounds etc... that the mouth is simply unaccustomed to making, you can't shape your mouth quite right, or that your motor engrams for you base language are too engrained and it makes learning new sounds harder. You can hear the phrase hundreds of time, then you try it and it still comes out different. Certainly some people who grew speaking certain languages, can learn and speak others much quicker, apart from similar vocabulary, they share similar sounds or pronunciation.

In reply to jon:

Some people are good linguists because they are good listeners and mimics; others aren't.

That's different from people who, in ignorance, mis-pronounce foreign names like Ikea and Ibiza as Eye-kea and Eye-beetha.

In reply to jon:

Why should UKC, a British website for British climbing, pander to these poxy french with their silly accents. This is a language where the word for Ninety Nine is "Four Twenty Ten Nine" - it's like they are still counting on their fingers

(This rant is in no way related to the fact that I have to provide a French canadian version of my software, and the the fact that the strings are always much longer plays havoc with my layouts)

In reply to RyanOsborne:
I've actually just fixed your post title before seeing this: Le Vendée Globe

There's a character encoding bug in the post edit process somewhere, it usually work fine on the initial post.

Edit: This is fixed.

In reply to Chris the Tall:

But its not just French that uses accents, or letters we don't use in English. I don't know for sure, but I strongly suspect English is one of the few European languages without them, I can't think of another although that's maybe a reflection of my limited knowledge

In reply to Rigid Raider:



In many words the Swedish letter I is pronounced as we say the E in English. But the I is generally considered to be a short vowel, so it's i-key-ya. Although you do hear e-key-ya too. There is a major difference in accent between älmhult (IKEA HQ) and Stockholm, and if you go up to Kiruna at first you think they are speaking Sami until you tune yourself in. So not even all Swedes say it the same.

I thought it was Eye-beeza?

In reply to jon:

We are Brexit now, there is no need for foreign accents on an English forum. Do you want to see posts in Japanese, Chinese and Arabic letters / characters? So why should fancy French accents be tolerated?

As regards the person who complained about the way we say Ikea, well of course it's not how the Swedes pronounce it. Nor is Toshiba the way the Japanese pronounce it. That's what happens when a word or brand gets taken into a foreign language. And you'd look pretty daft if you were the only person pronouncing it in Swedish when everyone else uses the accepted English pronunciation of Eye key ah. The same if you insisted on saying Paree instead of Parris when speaking in English.

In reply to jon:

Is it getting harder to make first accents?

In reply to Rigid Raider:


Or because they're cunning

In reply to Chris the Tall:



Sorry to derail a good rant, but wouldn't french-speaking Canadians translate "ninety nine" as "nonante neuf"?

In reply to deepsoup:

Belgians and French Swiss use septante, huitante/octante and neufante, IIRC. Some parts of France do/have, too.

In reply to deepsoup:

My understanding is that "nonante neuf" is a Swiss variant, but that French Canadian is generally more traditional, even than French French, so less likely to adapt these modern constructs.

But I use digits wherever possible, so that isn't in my list of translations

In reply to blackratdog:

My surname has an accent over one letter that seems to occur in very few languages - it alters the way the name is pronounced, but because some people seem to get tangled up over it (despite my surname only being five letters long) I tend to tell people my surname is the English pronunciation, as it makes life easier.

In reply to Tall Clare:

Wot, 'Clare'? Seems straightforward enough to me

How do you pronounce 'Tall' - as in 'Llanberis'?

In reply to Chris the Tall:


My googling pointed out that French is a fairly recently monolithic form, and that regional variations from historical use appear in Savoie, the Midi and other areas. In other words, these aren't 'modern constructs'...

In reply to Chris the Tall:
I just googled to try to sort out for myself which "90" Canadians would use. Confused the bejeezus out of myself for ten minutes then gave up. Using digits sounds like a good idea.

In reply to nniff:

For most us English types, that would make 'Tall' sound a lot like 'tackle'.

In reply to Doug:


Accents (or, to verge on the pedantic, diacritics) do exist in English, although usually in words borrowed from other languages eg paté, saké and maté (neither of which latter two has the diacritic in its original language).

Italian doesn't do accents in the sense of diacritics which change the pronunciation of the letters to which they are applied. You do see diacritics which look like acute and grave accents in Italian, particularly in printed texts, but they are usually there indicate when a word is stressed in a different way to normal.

The wiki article on diacritics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diacritic is quite a good read (if you like that sort of thing).

In reply to Martin W:


Are there any modern English words with accents which are not taken from another language ? Maybe there are but I can't think of one.

In reply to Tall Clare:


I always guessed that changed it to 'ny'. Or is that wrong?

In reply to summo:

Perhaps there should be a spectacularly missed the point button

In reply to Rigid Raider:


That's right. It's "YOCK-YA" and "IBBEE-FA".

Abseil
Linguist

In reply to captain paranoia:


Belgians don't use huitante/octante - I've never understood why considering they've taken the sensible step of using septante & nonante, but no, they seem to be in love with "four-twenty"

In reply to summo:

As the title of the thread says:

In reply to Pedro50:


Absolutely!

In reply to captain paranoia:

Almost right - it transforms an 'eh' to a 'yeh'.

In reply to Tall Clare:

Oh, I see.

'Tall Cleh' becomes 'Tall Clyeh. Gotcha . These small points make all the difference.



I'll get my coat

In reply to Paul Phillips - UKC and UKH:

Well despite most people missing the point, some spectacularly so, some deliberately maybe, you seem to have fixed it. Thanks, Paul.

In reply to blackratdog:

>. And you'd look pretty daft if you were the only person pronouncing it in Swedish when everyone else uses the accepted English pronunciation of Eye key ah.

On the telly adverts they say IKEE - A

In reply to graeme jackson:

Wikipedia says that in English it's long 'i' as in 'tide' + 'k' as in 'kind' + long 'e' as in 'seed + 'a' as in 'about'. Their explanation of the Swedish pronunciation (using the International Phonetic Aphabet for Swedish) makes it sound rather like "ickier" (which seems to be borne out somewhat by this promotional video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Nm7-EuctOs). This might explain why the company prefers the anglicised version!

I once noticed Brian Sewell called it ick-ay-ah in a TV programme. But then he was the sort of person who would do that.

Braun, the German consumer electricals manufacturer, call themselves "brawn" in their UK TV adverts.

In reply to Martin W:


I saw one of their adverts recently and particularly noticed it was pronounced (in the advert) as "brown", instead of (as I'd thought it was pronounced) "brawn". Thus: youtube.com/watch?v=T-W0evfnRw0&

Wikipedia agrees with me too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braun_(company)