"phonetically"

[Laurence Horn]

On Mar 6, 2013, at 9:36 AM, Lisa Galvin wrote:

> The Redd Foxx quote now reminds me of the time I was reading something about Julio Iglesias, and the article told the reader that, at the time he recorded the duet with Willie Nelson "To All the Girls I've Loved Before", he spoke no English and therefore had to sing the (English) lyrics "phonetically", that is, without understanding what the words meant.

--and I could imagine using that to describe the way I read Hebrew out load for my bar mitzvah, especially since in that case what I was reading was a quasi-phonetic transcription in the form of a transliteration.  You sort of need that for English too I imagine, if you only know Spanish, but not so much vice versa.  But I agree with Jon that it's odd to talk about *speaking* one's native language phonetically.  But I guess one could read English phonetically as a native speaker if one were illiterate with respect to ordinary orthography but could read IPA, say.

LH
>
> And we say "celebrant" in Orthodox lingo, too.
>
> Lisa Galvin
>
> On Mar 5, 2013, at 11:42 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: "phonetically"
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 7:45 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> speaks phonetically
>>
>> Interestingly, the Late-Great Redd Foxx, on his album, You Got to Wash
>> Your Ass, says of himself that, back in his days as an altar-boy back
>> at St. Benedict the Moor parish in Saint Louis, he "spoke Latin
>> _phonetically_."
>>
>> Your guess is as good as mine as to what, exactly, he meant by that.
>> We altar-boys weren't taught Latin and didn't speak Latin, sensu
>> stricto. We merely recited fixed formulae -
>>
>> Priest: Introibo ad altare Dei
>> Altar-boy: Ad Deum, qui laetificat juventutem meam
>>
>> - that we already knew - there were "ponies," called "altar cards,"
>> supplied, just in case - from years of reading along with the
>> "celebrant," as we say in Catholic, in our missals, before we achieved
>> stardom.
>>
>> --
>> -Wilson
>> -----
>> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
>> to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>> -Mark Twain
>>
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>>
>
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