Two for the show
Philips is also going Dunglish. “Ameezing”, the Dunglish pronunciation of “amazing”, has a whole new meaning. The ‘meezing’ part means to sing along, and the advert is for a sing along event. The ‘a’ becomes ‘ee’ in Dutch, but sounds more like ‘eemeezing’, as the first ‘a’ gets it too. This is why words like ‘access’ and ‘excess’ can sound exactly the same when spoken by some Dutch people. Here’s my quick Canadian rendition of access.mp3 and excess.mp3. My question to you is can Dutch people who are less familiar with English hear this difference? What you cannot hear, you cannot say yourself.
(Photo: Toon)
September 21st, 2005 at 9:30 am
The difference between excess and acces (between bed and bad) is extreemly difficult for Dutch peopel
Dutch people will also tell you Jack rhymes (??) with back.
It is hard to hear the difference and even harder to make the difference saying the word.
I consider myself almost a native speaker (though it’s deteriorating fast) but bed an d bad still needs a lot of attention.
September 21st, 2005 at 9:31 am
that’s ‘people’ of course, sorry typing error
September 21st, 2005 at 10:00 am
No problem (acces->access). Someone will change this capital Says soon as well 🙂
If a Dutch person reads the first A in Amsterdam (almost an O if you’re from here), then bad is pronounced right. Try it!
September 21st, 2005 at 11:21 am
Dat van ‘access’ en ‘excess’ klopt wel. Toen ik nog in Engeland woonde en voorbereidend op mijn terugkomst me alvast verdiepte in nederlandse internetproviders vond ik tot mijn vreugde de firma XS4All – excess for all, fantastisch! Je kunt m’n teleurstelling wel begrijpen toen bleek dat het om ‘access for all’ ging.
September 21st, 2005 at 1:45 pm
Ik heb wat vrienden die bij XS4all werken en het kan wat ‘excess’ opleveren 🙂 Leuk bedrijf vind ik.
September 21st, 2005 at 2:04 pm
Over ‘excess’ gesproken, er zijn ook nog de woorden ‘axis’ (=as, korte i, scherpe s), ‘axes’ (=assen, lange(re) ie, zachte(re) z) en ‘axes’ (=bijlen, meervoud van axe). Het laatste woord klinkt meer dan het tweede als excess/access, mede doordat de klemtoon (meer) op de eerste lettergreep ligt dan in axes (assen).
(het heeft niet zoveel meer met meezingen te maken, nietwaar? 😉 )
September 21st, 2005 at 2:36 pm
Axes is ook het meervoud van axis.
Laat we eens proberen:
axes.mp3
axis.mp3
September 21st, 2005 at 5:10 pm
I once worked for an American linguist who insisted that there is no ash in American English. (Ash is the a-sound in access.) She also claimed that American linguistics students were better than their Dutch brothers-in-arms, because the former were taught phonetic transcription as part of their standard curriculum. Without the ash-character, I imagine.
September 21st, 2005 at 8:08 pm
I remember you telling me this story. Screw them is the answer 😉
September 25th, 2005 at 5:20 pm
This reminds me of the time I was listening to the radio and the Dutch DJ was saying something about a song called “In sight your hat”. I spent several puzzled seconds trying to figure out what the title meant, until I realised the song was really called “Inside your head”.
September 26th, 2005 at 2:49 pm
Bewuste keuze om inderdaad Nederlands en Engels te kombineren.
Een mee-zing concert.
Dus niks Dungish, was een bewuste keuze om twee talen door elkaar te halen.
Guut Meuning
September 26th, 2005 at 5:04 pm
Door elkaar = Dunglish, maakt niet uit waarom. Deal is geen Nederlands het is onnodig en dat maakt de boel Dunglish.
October 3rd, 2005 at 1:32 pm
I ran into a few problems with my speech recognition software (ScanSoft Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8) while training it. These are the kind of pronunciation errors made easily if you’re not very careful!
October 3rd, 2005 at 4:38 pm
Hey Heylane,
Uh, Jack does rhyme with back in English.