14:19 by FoxTwo Ok so I'm gonna get a little picky today.
Sometimes, it just irks me so much that Singaporeans, majority of which are "educated" with English as the first language, can still write and speak so differently.
A long time ago, I wrote this. In a sense, this post is like a "followup" of that entry.
So what has this got to do with the post title?
Well, it's how many Singaporeans pronounce "owe". Yeah I know it's weird, there's no N in the word "owe" yet many people say "own" instead of "owe". Saying "own" to an American is actually to tell him you beat him hands-down at something. This phrase "You got owned!" is very familiar in gaming circles. As a side-note, the phrase recently changed to "You got pwned!", thanks to a popular spelling mistake by Blizzard in the game Warcraft circa 1998 or so.
I had a discussion about this with a friend some time back about Singaporeans and the pronunciation of words. She said, a large portion of the human race is mostly visual, hence they see a word and memorise its pronunciation, instead of using phonetics on the words. It's fine to mispronounce "Lavender" as "lah-ven-der" instead of "laven-der", but saying "own" instead of "owe" is almost hilarious.
This is especially so for Chinese, since the native language is pictorial in nature. People see a Chinese word, and memorise it. Hence, they apply the same principles to the English language. Hence, words like "spanner" is still being pronounced as "spunnah".
Very few people I know pronounce words phonetically. For people like me, I normally don't stumble when I come across a long word which I've not seen before. I just break it down into its phonetic components and pronounce it. Of course, the English language has its own quirks too, like "sabre" is pronounced "say-ber" but "genre" is pronounced "jon-rer". I will always remember and laugh at an incident my drinking buddy told me that happened to him in secondary school.
He said, once he was asked to read a passage by the teacher. Like me, he's a phonetic speller and reader. He came across the word "quay" and pronounced it "kway". When the teacher corrected him, he argued that if it's supposed to be pronounced as "key" then they should have spelt it K-E-Y. LOL! At least the Americans got it right - they called the place "Florida KEYS" and not "Florida QUAYS", in my opinion anyway.
If you've always struggled with the English language, and one of your weaker points is spelling words, I've just given you a clue to help you - learn phonetics. When I was a schoolkid, I prided myself in knowing how to spell words that I've never even seen before, by just listening to how it's pronounced.
That is also my Archille's Heel in the Chinese language too - you cannot apply phonetics to Chinese. For example, nobody could explain to me why "mouth" (口 pronounced as "kou") and "ten" (十 pronounced as "shi") becomes a "field" (田 pronounced as "tian"). Why can't the pronounciation be something like a combination of "kou" and "shi" and end up with something like "kosh"? Yup, you guessed it, I suck at Chinese.
And please, it's "oh" and not "own", ok?
Labels: quirks, random, Rant, Singaporeans
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vickie @ Thursday, January 17, 2008 6:24:00 PM erm.. sometimes I don't know how to pronounce a particular English word properly... may be I seldom talk in English....
But I can't admit I'm Chinese pro too. Sometimes I might used wrong grammar/ words in Chinese....
If talk about Own and Owe.... I don't think I have any problem on it... I used to say "owe" in stead of "own" -
FoxTwo @ Thursday, January 17, 2008 11:14:00 PM Merdurian - heh you're way better than me already. I flunked Chinese in school :)
Well since you're in Malaysia, maybe the "own" bug hasn't migrated up north yet, so you're spared the problem... heheh! -
Hendri @ Friday, January 18, 2008 2:02:00 PM
Nice entry...
My native language (Indonesian) is largely phonetics, with each letter corresponding to a phoneme. There are some exceptions, such as "bank" which is pronounced exactly the same as "bang". The only ambiguous letter is "e" which can be pronounced either as the schwa or the "normal" "e" (there's a term for this but I forgot).
Therefore when I learned English, I applied a similar principle. So when I see a new word, most of the time I can pronounce it almost correctly too (except the English quirks like you said).
Unfortunately, as a result I think I'll be struggling to learn Chinese. :P
BTW are you interested in linguistics as well? -
FoxTwo @ Sunday, January 20, 2008 6:46:00 PM
Hendri - well not really interested in linguistics per se, but the general observations. The funny thing about Singaporeans is that if an ang mo (foreigner) speaks with an American or British accent, they all understand him fine. If a local does the same, they go "huh?".
I remember once I was having dinner with a female friend who'd been in England for 10 years, and as such she spoke with a pure British accent. At the restaurant she asked the waiter "Does this dish come with mushrooms?" in her full British accent. The waiter couldn't understand her. Then I asked him "This one got mushroom or not?" and the waiter suddenly understood and said "oh dun have dun have!"
She was laughing her head off....
