I had an interesting experience at a group lunchtime seminar I was giving last week. I was speaking to a group at a company called "Zoran" and part way through the presentation, one of the participants raised his hand and asked "How do you pronounce our company name?"
My first reation was to feel a bit sheepish that I wasn't sure I was pronouncing it correctly. After collecting my thoughts, I realized, it wasn't obvious how to pronounce it. So, I asked the group (about 22 partcipants ) - what is the correct pronunciation of your company name?
About 5 different people gave 5 different answers! And the others remained silent. I took this as a "learning moment" and wrote the 5 answers on the board ( as close as we could come phonetically). One of the members of the group was a founder of the company, and a native Hebrew speaker ( the language the word "Zoran" comes from ... unbeknownst to me! ) He was one of the 5 who had replied.
I then proceeded to explain how I would determine the pronunciation of this word. I explained that I would probably stress the first syllable "ZOR.an" with long /ah/ or perhaps "ZOR.aen" or even use a "schwa" sound in the second syllable, but this isn't what any of the 5 people who responded were doing. Incidentally, none of them were native speakers of English. One was Korean, one was Chinese, one was Hebrew, one was Russian, and one was Vietnamese. All of them gave both syllables equal length!
At this point, we had a great opportunity to talk about word stress, but before I let it go, I asked the founder to once more say the word in its native pronunciation, and this time things got more interesting ... he said it louder, and we all listened intently, and I noticed the first sound he used doesn't exist it English. It wasn't a /z/, and /s/, a /dz/, a /zhe/ or anything else - it was a Hebrew sound the rest of us could not pronounce correctly. In addition, the second vowel was not an American vowel and the second syllable was not shorter. By defintion, none of the employees of the company had the tools they needed in their native languages to say the name of the company correctly, so we then set out to agree on a compromise, and I got a chance to explain American word stress.
When the session was over, one of the attendees ( a native speaker from HR who was just observing ) mentioned to me on her way out the door that she had struggled to pronounce the name of the company for months, much to her embarrassment, and had no idea why! She was so relieved to find out that everyone was in the same boat ... ( unless his / her first language was Hebrew, of course!)
This was not only an awareness in relation to foreign words. It also served as a helpful reminder that non-native speakers feel this way all the time when learning new English words. It's not simply a matter of learning new words; it's a matter of using sounds that are unfamiliar in word locations that are fundamentally unfamiliar while learning new words, which is, of course, a multi-faceted challenging task!
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Well, I agree to what Rebecca says here about non-native speakers. Non-native speakers try real hard to sound like Native American speakers but they fail miserably at times and the reason is as simple as that they use vowels and consonants of their own mother tongue, which may not even exist in American English. Even lots of sounds of American English do not exist in other langagues.
ReplyDeleteOne should be very careful when learning English or any other language that they forget their mother tongue while learning new language and learn new sounds of the language they wish to acquire.
DK