quest for info/suggestions. re: dialects

[Dennis R. Preston]

Accidental interlingual obscenities are fun. Almost every time you
innocently utter one, you get a free drink.
I hope those cross-cultural sensitivity programs (which keep you from
making hilarious foreigner mistakes and having people laugh their asses off
at you and love you all the more for it) all go out of business.

dInIs

>> "Dennis R. Preston" wrote:
>>>
>>> dInIs (who has even heard Frenchified pronunciations of his homeland
>>> cities, e.g. budaPEST - there are no 'pests" in "pesht" [it would be
>>> "peszt" if it were "pest"], and Hungarian stress always falls on the first
>>> syllable - [BUdapesht])
>
>Andrea Vine wrote:
>> I was told that if Szeged (city in Hungary) is pronounced as though it were
>> written in Polish, the resultant meaning is "shit" (sheged [Polish] vs. seged
>> [Hungarian]).  So Hungarians get a real kick out of Polish tourists trying to
>> ask directions.
>
>When I was in Lisbon last week, a Portuguese said that 'Chicago', when said
>with a Portuguese accent, sounds like "se cagó" = 'he shit/shat on himself'.
>
>DMLance

Dennis R. Preston
Professor of Linguistics
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736