Living off the wind of some
Yes, it was all done on purpose, but there are quite a few grains of truth in this Dunglish festival.
Note the sibilance, when the letter ‘s’ sounds like a snake in an animation film trying to talk. The cure is to pronounce the ‘s’ at the end of a word like a ‘z’. Why they can’t seem to teach that in English classes is beyond me.
The assumption that people can only speak Dunglish is a bit annoying, but hey, then it wouldn’t be funny.
And the advert is full of cheese, windmill and herring clichés as well as the painful reminder that we really can’t live off wind energy. At the risk of sounding very 1970s, I still think nuclear energy is going to make a comeback.
(Thankssss Jarno for the tip!)
November 16th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
HAHAHAHA! So awesome. My sister told me about this ad being on Dutch TV. Good stuff.
Ttotally tweeted the clip on my Dutch Idioms twitter feed: http://twitter.com/dutchidioms
November 16th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
I was about to suggest this commercial, but I should have “felt on my water” that you already blogged it. And you did. 😉
November 16th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
Oh noes! I made a water joke, not a wind joke! 🙁
November 18th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
‘The cure is to pronounce the ’s’ at the end of a word like a ‘z’. Why they can’t seem to teach that in English classes is beyond me.’
Except of course when the word-final ‘s’ really IS /s/, as it is after a voiceless consonant, and in some words spelled with -se (lease, practise, use [noun], goose). Tricky stuff.
‘the painful reminder that we really can’t live off wind energy’
Not off wind energy alone, no.
November 25th, 2009 at 9:12 am
The difference in auditory perception of the Dutch versus the English fricative has less to do with phonotactic distribution (when do you pronounce the letter s as /s/ and when as /z/) but with the “default” position of the tongue, which for Dutch is further back and hence makes it sound louder.
There are easy exercises to make your s thinner, but most teachers don’t seem to bother.
November 25th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
Vergeet niet dat heel wat niet-Engelsen het verschil doodleuk niet horen. Verrassend, maar waar. Ik heb het zelf meegemaakt op de Engelse vakgroep: in het talenlab zei een student consequent ‘boys and girls’ (met harde s). Hij werd erop gewezen dat het als /z/ moest klinken, keek verbaasd en zei ‘zo zeg ik het toch’. Tja, het kwam niet goed met de uitspraak, hij is niet uniek.
November 30th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
And some varieties of English don’t do final voiced -s in some contexts (‘Chicago Bearss’).
January 30th, 2010 at 6:52 am
@Jasper Sprengers: I suppose adds like this one, and perhaps even all Dunglish, ought to be pronounced with tongue in cheek.