Back when I lived in the United States, I dated a lovely woman of Dominican descent who was equally fluent in English and Spanish.
She had one habit that irked me at the time: when speaking English, she would often pronounce words of Spanish language origin, such as burrito, with a Spanish accent. A silly thing to be bothered by, for sure, but for me it seemed just a bit elitist, as if she were demonstrating that she knew how to pronounce a word better than everyone else.
I would point out that burrito was is in fact an English word. It exists in English dictionaries, complete with an English pronunciation.
I would point out that the English language is full of these borrowed words. Should we pronounce all words using the accent of their original language? Should we pronounce résumé with a French accent and kindergarten with a German accent? One could easily switch accents five times in a single sentence, and I don’t imagine anyone would consider that a good idea.
This question of pronunciation has resurfaced in my life, this time from the other direction. Now I live in Argentina, and here there are a handful of English words used in every-day life. For example, shopping means mall. Yes, in Argentina, the word shopping is a noun. It is used as in “They went to the shopping.”
And I must admit: now I understand why my girlfriend was so against pronunouncing burrito in an English accent. It is hard to butcher words from your own language! It really feels funny.
And, ironically, these borrowed words are among the hardest for me to pronounce correctly in Spanish. While real Spanish is beautifully consistent in its pronunciation (if you read a word you can pronounce it, and if you hear a word you can spell it), these borrowed words are not at all consistent. They are typically pronounced about half way between English and Spanish accents.
I juste read you were living in Argentina a while back.
“shopping” is a short of “shopping center”, this may explains why it is used as a noun.
Also, Argentinians as well as Spaniards usually pronouns the English words as they were written in Spanish.
In Chile, at least, some words still are pronounced in English (or bad English
. And
. I used an example that it happens
it will depends on the person or the moment. But, there are combination that may
sounds funny if you pay attention. For instance, I learnt ‘SQL’ as a Spanish pronounced
word (even if it is an English acronymn), so I say ‘SQL’ as ‘esequele’, but ‘SQLite’ I
pronounce it as ‘esequele-lite’ (lite in English
to me, but there are a lot of examples on this matter.
Finally, Argentinians have a different Spanish accent. Literally. They do not say
‘tira’ → ‘tirá’, ‘ten’ → ‘tené’, ‘mira’ → ‘mirá’, etc.
Comment by gpoo — October 12, 2009 @ 5:53 pm
Also, it is different when the word was introduced a long time before thant it is a new one. In the case of kindergarten it is an old one, but shopping is quite a new one (10
or 15 years or 20 old at the most).
Comment by gpoo — October 12, 2009 @ 5:57 pm