111 days ago (according to Technorati's statistics), the Calm One did a post on the pronounciation of words.
Sgforums.com also has a thread on this topic which I find equally interesting. Here are some words extracted from it.
"Vase", which should rhyme with 'Base', is very commonly pronounced here as 'V-Arse'
"Economic" should be "Air-conomic" but often pronounced "Ee-conomic", because "Economy" is pronounced as "Ee-conomy"
"Flour" should be pronounced as "Fl-Our" but we often pronounce it as "Fl-ah"
"subtle" - the B is silent.. pronounced "suttle"
"often" - the T is silent.. pronounced "offen"
Boat Quay and Clarke Quay was popular, they were both local delicacies, 'Boat Kueh' and 'Clarke Kueh'
"Singapore"... she mispronounced it as "Seng-ka-pore"
Visit the thread
I thought some of the pronunciations were British influenced, like V-arse and Flar.
ReplyDeleteAir-conomic and Fl-our and V-ayse sound American
i concur on the vase (varse vs vaze/british vs american) pronounciation.
ReplyDeleteThe same goes for past/pazz, arse/ass, etc.
I think the single most difficult area for someone outside (refering to ang moh countries) to understand the locals here is our lack of 'th' sound.
tree and three is pronounce the same way here.
theatre, theory, and you know... the rest.
I agree with straydog too. people rarely taket he effort to try and pronounce the 'th' sound, or they do so and completely mess it up and use it even when the hard 't' is supposed to be used.
ReplyDeleteI also have another gripe about local pronunciation, revolves around the '-sp' sound. Like 'Grasp'(Gr-air-sp or Gr-ars-p?), or 'Wasp'. I keep hearing is as 'Graps' and 'Waps', which irritates me to no end
tempest blue: mix mix. I don't know which are british and which are american. The '-sp' is difficult for me. Ontopof that lazy to pronounce 'sss-psss'
ReplyDeleteshortphat k: Your spelling also confusing. But good becos I understand. :)
ei|een: I always call my cousin ee-leen. hee hee.
straydog: 'th' is a challenge for me. dat, dis, dey,...
Please, no one who writes that "vase" MUST rhyme with "base" knows enough about English. "Vase" rhyming with "base" is American; "vahss" is British, but is also found in northeastern parts of the US IIRC. By the same token, "often" is legitimately pronounced either (EEther? EYEther? Heh - let's call the whole thing off) way. In fact, "often" with the pronounced 't' is the older way, then the 't' dropped out in the 15th century.
ReplyDeleteThere are peculiarly Singaporean uses of English. These aren't it, they're just rubbish pretentious attempts at 'correcting' what is perfectly legitimate usage.
Incidentally, there are two "th" sounds in English: the one that Singaporeans resolve to "d" ("the") and the one that becomes "t" ("thing").
I should also add, "economic" is correct with either pronunciation. And all of what I've just said about the stuff being legit pronunciations can be ascertained by just looking it up in any dictionary.
ReplyDeleteIf you want pronunciations to pick on: the 'l' is silent in "salmon".
But really I would guess that problems of comprehension between Singaporeans and other native English speakers are caused less by pronunciations of specific words (which are humorous but don't really inhibit comprehension), and more by general phonetic differences: the consonant-cluster issue that other commenters have alluded to, the fact that diphthongs often tend to be pronounced as monophthongs (i.e. the 'rounding' effect of the 'w' in words such as "how" is less emphasised), the general staccato rhythm of the speech - the combined effect of all that I would say is more bewildering than mispronunciations of individual words, just as it's bewildering when you hear someone speak in a thick Geordie accent...
daryl: Fwah. Guru. Kow tow kow tow. No wonder you study in H. Economics pronounced both ways ok huh? Roger that. Anyways 'Economics' is your thing. *wink wink*
ReplyDelete