Official debate thread #2
Well, this has been quite spirited, has it not?
Again, these three are debating real issues, not the ridiculous personal attacks in the GOP debates
= new reply since forum marked as read
Hillary owns this debate.
Go Hillary! 
Although I guess if it would help her win the Israel first vote she'd consider converting.
Haha, that's got to burn. 
Sorry. Yes, lies.
(I like it 
)
I think MOM is doing well on the Main Street vs. Wall Street front.
rofl: : 
instead of a skirt or dress! 
That's just what I said when she started hammering on Bernie!
Between the parties... 
a form identifiably different from other regionally distinct forms of the same language. Pronunciation is one of those usages.
If everyone around you says, "THE-uh-ter," whereas everyone in another region that speaks English says, "the-AY-ter," then over time the "THE-uh-ter" pronunciation becomes a feature of the regional dialect.* Is one a "correct" and the other an "incorrect" pronunciation? Perhaps one starts out as a mispronunciation, but eventually it becomes a dialect feature. Eventually such dialect differences become so pronounced that they become mutually unintelligible languages. English started out as a dialect of Old Low German, while the Scandinavian languages started as dialects of Old High German. They are now distinct languages.
I know from experience that there is a significant degree of mutual intelligibility betwee Spanish and Italian, and friends who know tell me that Portuguese and Spanish have similar comprehension overlaps. I found that to be true when I had a Brazilian student once with a Spanish name. During a conference I asked to read her notes for an essay. She laughed and said, "They aren't in English."
I didn't yet realize she was from a Portuguese speaking country in Latin America. (It was early in the semester, so I hadn't learned that much yet about my students' backgrounds.) Thinking she was a Spanish speaker, I assured her that her notes wouldn't be a problem for me.
I realized right away that they were in Portuguese rather than Spanish, but I found I could read them as easily as if they were in Spanish.
When I lived in some parts of the deep South, we pronounced New Orleans as "N'Awlins." In some other parts of the South we said "New Orlins." When I moved to Pennsylvania at age 12 1/2, I had to learn to say, "New Or-LEENZ." People around me mocked my initial "mispronunciation" of the name, but of course it was a feature of the Southern dialects I had grown up speaking (more than one Southern dialect version, since as an Air Force brat I lived in different areas growing up).
When English speakers adopt words from other languages, we eventually anglicize their pronunciation. Those who pointedly use the original pronunciation end up sounding both pretentious and foolish. On SNL they did a sketch once with Jimmy Smits as a latino employee who was taken aback by the way his anglo co-workers insisted on pronouncing Spanish origin words the way they would be pronounced in Spanish. The weather girl spoke of tornadoes that way, and Florida was pronounced as if in Spanish rather than in its English form as the name of a state. It was quite funny.
We don't say, "Frahnz" when speaking of France, or "MEH-hico" for Mexico. Most Americans mispronounce Qatar as "Kuh-TAR" (it should be "KAT-er"
.
Unless they are frequently mispronounced by new sreaders and others widely heard, the names of countries (like Iraq) tend to take longer to anglicize, partly because we hear them pronounced by news readers all the time, and partly because the anglicized form one region adopts in accordance with their underlying dialect rules that govern how certain sounds are changed over time might be limited to only that region, or to only a few small regions.
I bet that many, perhaps most, people in Vermont pronounce Iraq and Iran the way Bernie does. Most people I encounter in Kansas do, and most people I know from parts of the South also do. I suspect that in a hundred years either "EYE-rak," or more likely "eye-RAK," will be the standard American pronunciation of the name. But for now, it is just a regional variation.
*NOTE: I am using caps and spelling to indicate stress and pronunciation, because most people are not all that familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet.
"secretary." It's "administrative assistant."
Compare that to trump and Carly who think they are best buds with him.
