Feb. 14th, 2006 08:52 pm
An inventory of flaws
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muckefuckI can't remember who the author was--it was years ago now. In any case, his complaint--that he lacked the proper flaws--struck home with me. Perhaps it was because of one of the examples he used, the lament that "my otherwise perfect Italian will never be marred by a heavy Tuscan accent". (Needlesss to say, he didn't actually speak Italian--that was rather the point of the piece.)
I've been thinking about the accents I have in other languages--I mean in addition to my varying degrees of American accent, which is definitely an improper flaw. I learned to speak German in southwestern Germany and it shows (i.e. back /a/, /g/ for /ç/ in word-final -ig, gell as a tag question, etc.), as does the fact that the only Spanish-speaking country I've been to is Spain. In high school, I was taught Latin American Spanish, but today my overall accent is northern Peninsular (i.e. /s/ (apical) vs. /θ/, /j/ vs. /ʎ/, no aspiration or velarisation, etc.).
In some cases, such as Catalan, my pronunciation approximates the standard. In others, it's a mishmash: My first Welsh grammar mixed dialectal forms willy-nilly. I've unlearned most of the "lies" (to use the term one of my tutors did) in it, but a lot of the Southern bits (e.g. [i] for /Ɨ/, /e/ for <au>, e for "he/him", etc.) have held on, even though all my teachers since then speak Northern varieties.
I'm happy to have a Taiwanese accent on my Mandarin (though I'm doing my best not to confuse the retroflexs with the corresponding alveolars, as many Taiwanese do), but I kind of wish I'd learned a more interesting pronunciation of Korean than standard Seoul. (I wouldn't care for the merged vowels of my teacher's Kyengsang accent, but having the tonal distinctions would rock.) If only I'd taken that contract to teach abroad on Jeju!
My French, like most of my remaining languages, is so primitive that accent isn't even an issue, but I confess an affection for the beautifully old-fashioned pronunciation that Nuphy sometimes uses. Who wouldn't want to sound like a protagonist in a Cocteau film? (I mean, if you have to speak a language as brutally ugly as French, that is.)
I've been thinking about the accents I have in other languages--I mean in addition to my varying degrees of American accent, which is definitely an improper flaw. I learned to speak German in southwestern Germany and it shows (i.e. back /a/, /g/ for /ç/ in word-final -ig, gell as a tag question, etc.), as does the fact that the only Spanish-speaking country I've been to is Spain. In high school, I was taught Latin American Spanish, but today my overall accent is northern Peninsular (i.e. /s/ (apical) vs. /θ/, /j/ vs. /ʎ/, no aspiration or velarisation, etc.).
In some cases, such as Catalan, my pronunciation approximates the standard. In others, it's a mishmash: My first Welsh grammar mixed dialectal forms willy-nilly. I've unlearned most of the "lies" (to use the term one of my tutors did) in it, but a lot of the Southern bits (e.g. [i] for /Ɨ/, /e/ for <au>, e for "he/him", etc.) have held on, even though all my teachers since then speak Northern varieties.
I'm happy to have a Taiwanese accent on my Mandarin (though I'm doing my best not to confuse the retroflexs with the corresponding alveolars, as many Taiwanese do), but I kind of wish I'd learned a more interesting pronunciation of Korean than standard Seoul. (I wouldn't care for the merged vowels of my teacher's Kyengsang accent, but having the tonal distinctions would rock.) If only I'd taken that contract to teach abroad on Jeju!
My French, like most of my remaining languages, is so primitive that accent isn't even an issue, but I confess an affection for the beautifully old-fashioned pronunciation that Nuphy sometimes uses. Who wouldn't want to sound like a protagonist in a Cocteau film? (I mean, if you have to speak a language as brutally ugly as French, that is.)
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I can read (to some extent) more languages than I can write, but I can actually speak even fewer languages - and for some languages where I know some words, I learned from a book, so my pronunciation with have a random accent.
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Both my ex and I speak more of a Castillian Spanish, with flaws. My R's front trill randomly, sometimes sounding like more of an L, causing people to repeatedly ask me if I learned from a Puerto Rican. My ex, on the other hand, is super Scandanavian, even in the pronunciation of his ENGLISH vowels, so he umlauts his SPANISH ones. Yes, he speaks Castillian Spanish with a Swedish accent. It's hilarious to hear him say "ty" instead of "tú" ^o^