Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 August 5

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August 5

(Turkish) question about address

"Yesilköy Cad. No:9 a Blok Daire:3-4 34153 Florya-Istanbul/TÜRKİYE" Is this in Yesilkoy, or Florya, or both? Is this on the property of Ataturk Airport?

Thanks WhisperToMe (talk) 00:00, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

AFAIK, "Cad" should be short for "Caddesi", meaning "street" in Turkish. "Yesilköy Cad." would thus be "Yesilköy street". Therefore, it should be in Florya (I'm assuming) and is right next to Atatürk Airport, according to Google Maps.--Zoppp (talk) 22:06, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Thank you very much! WhisperToMe (talk) 01:51, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

German: Pronunciation of clusters zsch and tzsch

Our article on German orthography claims that German clusters zsch and tzsch are pronounced as [t͡ʃ], implying that the sounds of (t)z and sch have merged into a single affricate consonant. Some sources outside Wikipedia confirm this. However, other sources claim that those two sounds are pronounced separately, [t͡s.ʃ], and so told me a couple of Bulgarians who know German better than I do. The German IPA transcription at the Friedrich Nietzsche article is periodically changed from [ˈniːtsʃə] to [ˈniːtʃə] and vice versa. Those clusters are extremely rare in German, and occur maybe only in a few proper names: Nietzsche, Petzschner, Lommatzsch. Could someone shed light on the question whether Germans would pronounce for example Nietzsche as NIEZ-sche [ˈniːt͡s.ʃə], or as NIETSCH-e [ˈniːt͡ʃ.ə]? And what about any other examples? I'm aware that there might be regional differences, and that those clusters are so rare that even native German speakers might not know what to do with them (like some native Romanian speakers, who mispronounce Pecica as PE-ci-ca [ˈpe.t͡ʃi.ka]; it actually is PECI-ca [ˈpet͡ʃʲ.ka]). --Theurgist (talk) 03:11, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

I personally would pronounce it as [ˈniːt͡ʃə] and I've never heard the other version (then again, not a word that comes up very often). My guess is that [ˈniːt͡s.ʃə] is a spelling pronunciation by people who are consciously trying to get it "right". But personal names are notoriously variable; often people with a particular name have their own idea of how their family name is pronounced. Do these clusters actually occur outside of personal names? --Terfili (talk) 07:20, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

A discussion on that point can be found here, in German; I'm sure there are lots more out there. I think it is fair to say that most people nowadays say [ˈniːtʃə]. Whether that has always been the "correct" pronunciation is not clear. There are suggestions that the name (and all the others spelt with tzsch) is of Slavic origin. That is not uncommon (my own family name is Slavic although my family has been German for as long as we can trace it back), and indeed the names with the tzsch seem to cluster in the east or southeast of Germany where there used to be significant overlap with between German and Slav populations. Another contributor suggests that "Nietzsche" goes back to Nikolaus (sort of a diminutive form) and that the spelling may just have been an accident when entering the name in a church registrar at a time when there was no standardized spelling. --Wrongfilter (talk) 08:25, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

The phoneme occurs in some proper names of Slavic connotation like Delitzsch [deː lɪtʃ] or Simon Jentzsch or Heber Jentzsch. Native German speakers who have heard these names before will pronounce them tʃ as heard, and the others will try to pronounce them as your Bulgarians did or whatever they think is adequate. See also Bernhard Grzimek [ˈɡʒɪmɛk], another name of Slavic origin, which troubles German speakers enormously. --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 14:49, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

I also say tʃ, just like in: Zschopau, Zschokke, Klotzsche, Kretzschmar (<z> is pronounced ts in German, cf. Zoo vs. Katze or plazieren that became platzieren in 1996, so Zschopau corresponds to words like Nietzsche).--91.12.215.212 (talk) 15:19, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

why do people from japan speak english which such thick accents

why is English so hard for them to pronounce? i read somewhere that japanese PRONUNCIATION is no more difficult for an english speaker to master than is spanish pronunciation, but it does not appear to be a 2-way street. i know lots of chinese people and in general they are better able to master english phonology than japanese, who are just hopeless (sorry if i offend the japanese people).--Fran Cranley (talk) 03:46, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Some Japanese people speak excellent English and some don't (just as is the case for speakers of any language).

In general, English has a lot of sounds that Japanese doesn't, and its prosodic pattern is different (English speech rhythm is based on stress, whereas I think Japanese is based on morae.

Generalizations about Japanese peoples' English ability may also affect the style of language education in Japan. There is also a popular perception among many people there that Japanese is hard for other people to learn and other languages are hard for Japanese to learn; such attitudes may affect language learning. Nannette Gottlieb's book Language and Society in Japan has a lot of interesting stuff about this. rʨanaɢ (talk) 03:52, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

You also need to take the situation of language learners into account. English is a compulsory course in Japanese schools. So there are many people who know some English but have never practiced it much. In the English-speaking world however Japanese is not compulsory and most learners learn Japanese voluntarily and thus much more motivated. --::Slomox:: >< 09:23, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

When I went to Japan as a student in the early 1990s, my class was 1/3 British, 1/3 Australian, and 1/3 American, and the Japanese constantly remarked that the Americans had the worst pronunciation out of the lot of us. Some even went so far as to say they couldn't understand Americans talking at all (especially the 'r' sound). Fair do, I will agree that the Americans in our group did speak Japanese with very strong American accents (e.g. 'wakarimashita' > 'waa-kaa-Ree-MAA-shi-taa', and words like 'ryokou' were incomprehensible ('Ree-YOW-kow')) but over time I came to realise that not all Americans were like that. I found some whose accents were fairly indistinguishable from native Japanese speakers (e.g. Thane Camus - but he moved there when he was 9 years old). In any case, it's a stereotype - I knew many Japanese who had excellent pronunciation (watch the NHK English language news channels), and many who didn't. The ones who didn't were just not linguists. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 12:18, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Just as some folks have an "ear" for music and some don't, some folks have an "ear" for the sound of a language, and others don't. I've known many Asians, and some can be very hard to understand even when they know English grammar and vocabulary very well. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:44, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Exactly. Besides, having an accent is not a problem for communication. Well, for some people it may be... :) --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 13:50, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Could part of the problem for Japanese learners of English be gairaigo? These are words taken from other languages, mainly English, and then pronounced using native Japanese phonotactics. Some Japanese think that these gairaigo are English words that should be comprehensible to English speakers, perhaps with a slight effort to omit extra syllables, when in fact their pronunciation is so different from the original English pronunciation that they are not. Another issue is wasei-eigo, or compounds based on gairaigo that Japanese perceive as English terms but that have no counterpart in standard English and that are generally incomprehensible to native English speakers. Marco polo (talk) 14:06, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

That may be part of it. In the same way we have English speakers saying 'SAMyurai', 'hiroSHEEma', 'suDOEku', 'kuh-NITchy-wah', and whatnot, and a lot of the time these words are unintelligible to the average Japanese (ok, 'sudoku' is actually unknown, anyway, but it's just an example). I think it's more a case of people (on both sides) either not knowing the difference or not caring. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 14:37, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

What english-speakers hear from japanese may only confirm a stereotype. After WW2, Hollywood produced films that glorified the U.S. victory over Japan. Since it was hard to find Japanese extras, anyone who could be made up to look Japanese was employed. That left the problem of imitating Japanese speech. The extras were told to memorize "I tie your shoe. You tie my shoe". Cuddlyable3 (talk) 22:04, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Why? Bielle (talk) 22:25, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Can we have a reference/source/citation for that, C3? --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 14:36, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

See [1], and click "Listen". 86.160.84.219 (talk) 01:13, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Fascinating, 86.160.84.219! That's a really helpful link. Bielle (talk) 01:18, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

You may remember the film where a Japanese lady says "Yangzhou stay there. Yuuta issue now." Cuddlyable3 (talk) 15:33, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

No. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 15:58, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Incidentally, while AFAIAA this does not mean anything at all in Japanese (and the Google translation is understandably gibberish), my grasp of Japanese is severely limited. Does this sequence of syllables suggest any meaning at all to a fluent Japanese speaker? 86.179.6.185 (talk) 19:46, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Means nothing at all. There was a TV program on a while back (might be still on), where Tamori was showing people how to learn English phrases, but using Japanese. One English phrase was 'what time is it now', and this was to be remembered as 'hotta imo ijiru na', which means "don't mess around with the potatoes which have been dug up"...... 'Course, the idea was a hit. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 20:25, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

It's supposedly an imitation of how Japanese sounds; it doesn't need to mean anything. (I can see how the combination of a syllable plus "shoe" may have sounded Japanese to some Americans, since a lot of common Japanese phrases end with something sounding vaguely like this--for instance, arigato gozaimasu.) This is comparable to how ching chong is sometimes used as an imitation of Chinese speech, even though it doesn't mean anything.

Re KageTora, I found this. rʨanaɢ (talk) 20:12, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Ah, OK, then. In that case, I will accept the testimony of 'Terry'. Cheers. :) --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 20:25, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Hehe, yep, that's the best thing I could find. (Although, to be fair, I never look past the first page of a Google search...) rʨanaɢ (talk) 20:36, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

At that page it says "Languages such as Chinese and Japanese pay great attention to the pitch and intonation of words, and the same word with a different intonation can indeed have radically different meanings. [...] while the Japanese 'kansen' can mean any of 'main-line', 'warship', 'sweat-gland', 'infection', 'government', 'appointed' and 'witnessing a battle'." Firstly, I know that Japanese has a pitch-based stress system that can differentiate between otherwise homophonous words, but is it reasonable to lump Japanese together with Chinese in this respect, or is it just the usual case of people thinking "oh, Japanese must be quite a lot like Chinese" just because of the writing system? Isn't the Japanese stress system scarcely more complicated than the English one, albeit implemented differently? Secondly, how many of those "kansen" words are differentiated by "pitch and intonation"? 86.179.6.185 (talk) 21:36, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

You are correct that the Japanese and Chinese tone systems are very different. rʨanaɢ (talk) 21:57, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

The Japanese pitch accent does indeed differentiate between words - 'kumo' can mean either 'cloud' or 'spider' depending on the pitch. This is further compounded by the fact that it's also a regional thing (and 'kumo' meaning 'cloud' in Tokyo means 'spider' in Osaka (and vice versa) for example). I am not an expert on the tones, to be honest, so I can't answer about 'kansen'. I do notice when people speak with a different intonation from what I am used to (Central Japan, Nagoya), but I can't really comment on it. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 22:11, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

I have this conception that these examples like "kumo" are basically no more complicated than the English "SUBject" and "subJECT", except that in English the words being differentiated by stress are almost always related, whereas in Japanese they may not be (and, of course, the mechanism of indicating the stress is different). I.e., it's a complete different ball game from Chinese. I'd be happy to be corrected if this is wrong. 86.179.6.185 (talk) 22:35, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

No, it's not complicated at all, as most of the time the meaning can be worked out by context. Nobody in their right mind is going to tell you the sky is full of huge black spiders, or there's a big hairy cloud in the bath. Chinese is a little more complicated, but then again, most of the time people can work things out from context there, too, even if the tones are wrong. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 23:05, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Japanese morae or sounds consist of one vowel or consonant/s and a vowel . See Gojūon. Japanese words always end with a vowel. Please try these at the Google translate link above and comapre the pronunciation in ja and en. リズム, リアルプレイヤー, 名古屋 and 横浜. I tried different words, but some ja pronunciations were terrible at accent. So don't trust G pronunciation entirely. As for "What time is it now", Nakahama Manjirō said en sounded like this and that in ja. and it was one of example phrases, a most notable one, he mentioned. 揚げ豆腐/fried tofu/age dofu can be used as "I get off" and 親友はゲイ/(my) best freind (is a) gay/shin'yū wa gei/ can be "see you again". I don't think using "shoe" at the end of a sentence to mimic ja is not a good idea. Use "show" instead. Neither "I tie your shoe. You tie my shoe" nor "Yangzhou stay there. Yuuta issue now" means anything in ja and sounds nonsense to native speakers, they may sound like ja to non-ja speakers though. As for "kansen", it is not a good example to explain Japanese pitch accent. The word "kansen" has a lot of meaning, kanji are different though, the accent is the same low/high/high/high. See good examples in our article. AFAIAA can be read as ア・ファイアー/a fire, if it is a romanized ja phrase. Oda Mari (talk) 07:24, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for that insight, Mari - it's always good to have a native speaker round when there's a question about pronunciation. BTW, 'AFAIAA' is 'as far as I am aware'. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 09:18, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

I'll add some personal experience to the original subject of this question: when I had Japanese lessons in Cambridge (nearly 30 years ago), my teach spoke fluent English, and had taught Japanese at the University of Hawaii, but her English accent was so poor that there were occasions when I had difficulty understanding her because I thought she was saying a Japanese word that I did not recognise, and in fact she was saying an English word. Her English, as far as I remember, was entirely made up of Japanese sounds. --ColinFine (talk) 20:44, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

One of my Japanese teachers, in the school I went to in Japan in the 90s, was once teaching us a reading lesson. She'd read a bit (and we'd read silently along), then ask us questions. One question was the meaning of the phrase 'kore wa jijitsu desu' ('this is the truth'). When we failed to answer, she offered her translation: 'this is f*cked'. We all frantically looked for the phrase in the text. She had, of course, meant to say 'this is [a] fact'. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 21:27, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

Oda Mari: don't you mean Japanese words always end with a vowel or nasal? I don't know Japanese, but I know Japanese phonology allows codas, so your comment confused me a bit (unless you mean that Japanese words in sentential contexts always have some sort of suffix, like a case marker, and those always end in vowels? I don't know) rʨanaɢ (talk) 22:49, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

Rjanag, according to the Gojūon, the 'n' is considered to be a separate syllable (pronounced as 'un' when in isolation, and, so, yes, ends in a nasal, but it is the only syllable that does....). --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 00:22, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

Honestly, I find that English-speakers will tend to overestimate their grasp of another language, heh. Probably because other cultures generally do not laugh in your face if you mispronounce something, which in turn is probably because most English-speakers will expect you to speak English rather than the other way around. But yeah, despite what you have "read somewhere", it is actually a two-way street. Even Spanish comes out a bit off, even in English speakers who claim mastery - e.g. "Hay-soos" (Jesus), "Paid-row" (Pedro), "Hoe-say" (Jose), etc.

If you think non-English accents are funny, you should think about how your attempts to speak other languages might sound from a native speaker's perspective. It's just as inadvertently hilarious, trust me. Americans for example (but generally not Brits) usually completely ignore glottal stops that feature in a lot of Asian languages. In our languages (Filipino), replacing glottal stops with elongated vowels is usually connected to a specific minority - gay people. ;P You can see how that might be hilarious in certain situations. Not to mention incorrect verb-noun conjunctions, tenses, stress on the wrong syllables, and general grammar gaffes. It's all fine though, just please don't make the mistake of equating broken English with stupidity. -- Obsidi♠n Soul 21:38, 8 August 2011 (UTC)