2018-02-04 21:10:06

So I've been curious about this topic for a while now, and its related to people who do not speak English natively mispronouncing words that have a V or W in them. For instance, they will say Woice rather than voice, or something like vhere is the bathroom; that's veird. Probably the most famous example I know of is Walter Koenig as Chekov saying nuclear wessels in star trek IV - the voyage home.

Anyway, I'm curious where this stems from, I know other languages do use these letters differently, but they tend to use other English constructs correctly. So, my question is, why does this hang up happen? Is it just a habit formed by using the V and W differently in your language, so it just feels more natural this way? Is it just not knowing how to pronounce the V and W in english? The thing is, I've heard people use these correctly in one sentence, and then incorrectly a few sentences down the road, so I'm confused about the confusion.

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2018-02-04 21:52:01

The only confusion that I make with the W is that in my language W, is pronunced double v, whyle in english is pronunced double U. So I'd say that I have confusion when I have to spell something that contains a W. I'm trying to correcting this though, and I'm making this error less than before probably.

Paul

2018-02-04 23:44:37

vindow, vaashing machine, (I just put duble a's for the screen reader to pronounce the word the way I want), vord, vish, valk instead of walk, vaant instead of want, and hell there were more!
don't laugh at me, but these were the words I used to mispronounce when I started English. I didn't know the right spelling, and I didn't have anyone with fine accent and pronunciation to help me out with words. Plus we don't have w in persian. It's just v, v and v.
my English still sucks but I'm getting better over time, and I'm still looking for people to talk to, so I could make it even better

:)

2018-02-05 00:13:29 (edited by CAE_Jones 2018-02-05 00:14:30)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OGeIzmu9DSA
V and W were originally the same sound. Actually, U and V were originally the same sound. Phonetics have changed quite a bit all over the world over the centuries, and one of these is that central and eastern Europe didn't distinguish the same phoneemes as the Romance languages and English.
But, hey, imagine how native Chinese speakers react to westerners who can't distinguish qi from chi or ji from zhi or xi from shi. smile

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2018-02-05 00:14:09

In most eastern european languages, V and W are pronounced the same, usually all with the english V sound as in victor. And in a few, like Polish, the V isn't even used at all, there are just no Polish words that use it unless it's some saying that came from Latin. So when someone is learning English for the first time and hears the V sound, their first instinct is just to slap a W there. Many people also don't switch speech synthesizers and just read English with their native language's voice. And in many cases this can actually teach you quite a lot about English spelling, but in the case of the V's and W's the synthesizer may either not make it obvious how to spell a V/W word or teach you incorrect spelling all together.

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2018-02-05 04:03:29

AH OK, learned some interesting things. I didn't make the topic to laugh at people learning english, or demean their efforts, hell, I have a lot of respect for people who can do that, i just can't learn languages, I've tried, and I can't do it.

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2018-02-05 04:18:28

I've heard it said that as far as second languages go, English is by far the hardest to learn, if that's true, then my hat is off to any one that manages to do it, even if it's only marginally well.

2018-02-05 04:23:30

I've heard it's pretty hard, too. I think English grammar is much simpler than some easier languages, but the spelling and pronunciation are royally confusing.

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2018-02-05 07:40:07

Well, I think english is easier than other languages like, deutch or french.

Paul

2018-02-05 10:54:38

well I never had problems with v and w simply because in romanian we don't use the w so I learned how to pronounce it right when I started learning english. Learning a language depends very much on your native one imo, it's much easier for someone with a german background to learn english than for someone speaking a language with latin roots simply because the two language families are quite different. The most difficulties that I had when learning english were with spelling. Romanian is a fonetical language so you pronounce the words as you write them. It seemed so weird for me to write in a way and read it an other way but I got used to it after some time. Ironically though, the romanian voice helped me the most to learn the english spelling since I taught myself to use this voice when reading english.

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2018-02-05 19:03:49

I've also noticed that people who do use them correctly might slip up if they talk too fast etc.

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2018-02-06 00:54:55

Hi.
Well, I know that many german people starting to learn english mess up the v and the w because in German, the letter w sounds a bit like the letter v in english, I can't really spell how it would sounds though.
I sometimes also still mess this up when I am spelling something, but luckily over the last years, this got better and is almost gone now.
Also something that anoys me about germans speaking english that the TH is mostly pronounced as a d, a t or an s sound, which is a part of that german accent you sometimes hear in movies or TV shows.
Greetings Moritz.

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2018-02-06 02:41:29

The th sound is apparently rare, as consonants go. I've met people with otherwise perfect English who can't do the unvoiced version (The voiced version never stuck out enough for me to notice either way).
If it's coming out as an s or sh, one probably has the tongue too high. Since English vowels have risen in tongue position over the centuries, it does seem a bit odd that English is one of the heavy users of this sound. From what I can tell, the point is teeth. I don't know how people who lack teeth make the sound (maybe toothless gums work, but I'd expect that  to favor sh). I actually lost my upper incisors when I was 5 (they grew back!), and I notice that I make the sound by flattening my tongue so it touches almost all of my teeth except those four. Another way is like s, but with the tongue dropped, with the tip more or less anywhere from the top of the teeth down. I can get it to work with the tip of my tongue going out between top and bottom teeth, so long as  it has enough contact, but I find doing it that way without curling my tongue is difficult, and that is apparently a genetic ability that not everyone has, so "low, flat, touch nothing but teeth and air" is probably the best way. (But if you can curl your tongue and can't do it any other way, between the teeth might work for you?)

P.S. I seem to remember finding a way to type one of the dropped th letters (eth or thorn) on iOS, but I can't seem to refind it. Am I imagining things? Was I playing with UEB at the time? The only keyboards I have set up are English US and Japanese.

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2018-02-06 02:55:30

For me personally I sometimes mispronounce v and w when I'm talking fast or using sentences that contain either one or the other but not the combined but suddenly the tone shifts. Where was the wolf, wondered Willy. He was wery afraid of the volf and vas hoping it wouldn't show up. (for some reason some words tend to restore me on the right track)

The th, my mom has a habbit of overpronounciating the punch in the th, but for me I just do a soft, but not proper d. I'd rather sound like I'm chilled and don't give a fuck, rather than overannounciating. Oh and speaking of chilled, the chilled is also something I struggle with, and it usually becomes shill and shildren and shicken. tongue
While we're discussing things I tend to do wrong on, the j and the u sometimes snag with one another, for example in young or jungle. So young becomes jung and jungle becomes yungle tongue
I don't really care, if I am in a more professional conversation I of course think and manage quite well as far as pronouncing goes, but when I hang out on skype on hours for end ... I'm just not gonna bother. I developed my style of speaking years ago after I tried to skype someone using a relatively proper accent for hours on end and it was really, really difficult. So I eased up on the teeth clenching (clenshing?) for the the sound, and the  became de.
This just made me think of another example when mixing up forced the's with the d sound. I'm going to spell this phonetically, or anyway eloquence-phonetically:
Dare was no way in hell dat he was going to do dat fing. He sighed, den, oh wait let's correct my speech. Then he pulled on the ... actually I can't come up with a word to use and get eloquence to speak properly. Hmmm

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2018-02-06 02:56:51 (edited by flackers 2018-02-06 03:02:45)

Even tons of British people substitute the th sound for other stuff. Sometimes with an f, so they'll say birfday and fru instead of birthday and through. And Irish people and related dialects like scouse substitute th for d, as in dis and dat, meaning this and that. Or they'll say stuff like sutten and notten instead of something and nothing. So the th sound causes trouble even in the place where the most native of English is spoken.

2018-02-06 03:51:19

that's mostly cockney I think though, like faaver baaver, bruhver muh-ver. Frilled rather than thrilled i.e. I'm not overly frilled about it. etc.

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2018-02-06 12:43:53

The oddest th substitution I've heard in Britain is from Adam Buxton doing his country man thing. I think he sort of copied it off Noel Fielding who used to do a posh accent but with the th replaced with a v, so words like with becomes wiv. There was something really funny about the mix of an upper class English accent with the diction of more working class dialects. Adam took it one step further and put the v sound at the start of words that begin with th, So words like them and this become vem and vis. It's pretty funny.

2018-02-06 13:36:26

Yeah it seems a lot of other languages don't use the th sound, because a lot of people who take up english don't pronounce it. What's weird is that I've literally heard the same person use it, and then go back to using it like a d or something, so they're capable of doing it, they just don't except in rare cases.

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2018-02-06 22:12:32

I find I can make the East Asian consonant sounds correctly, but it takes conscious effort and practice, so in practice I can't keep it up without sounding like that snewdy intellectual who emphasizes how French they sound while saying sink and bo-coop. Whereas it comes naturally if you've been doing it since the very low single digits, and it gets harder to pick up new phoneemes after that window.

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"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.