Nicaragua

[Jonathan Lighter]

I usually pronounce it the way a Portuguese speaker of South American Spanish (as a second language) would expect me to pronounce it if I were a native speaker of Castilian Spanish attempting to pronounce it in the manner of a monolingual speaker of Southwestern American English who has lived many years in New Zealand.

Or at least I try.

JL

"Mark A. Mandel" <mamandel at LDC.UPENN.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Mark A. Mandel"
Subject: Re: Nicaragua
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Barbara Need writes:
>>>

The sound spelled "g" in Spanish somewhat resembles the sound spelled
with the same letter in Dutch. Otherwise, the pronunciation of
Nicaragua in English is only trivially distinct from its pronunciation
in English. How does an English-speaker pronounce "Nicaragua" in such a
way as to sound pretentious?

<<<

In Latin American pronunciation the intervocalic /g/ is often fricativized,
and /gw/ often becomes /w/. The first vowel in "Nicaragua" is [i:] in
Spanish and [I] in English, the "a"s are [a] rather than schwa, and the /r/
is a tap rather than a retroflex liquid.

As for pretentious, see my previous e-mail.

-- Mark A. Mandel
[This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]

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