Proesmans? What's that
The world is actually well connected, at least if you’re using the internet. My virtual personna through which I experience internet adventures has my real name attached. It’s the same name that sometimes causes funny pronounciations and confusion.
Easily mistaken for a small, confined space, the internet is actually a vast universe of content and interaction. It’s ours to shape and efforts by the tech giants made that space virtually unlimited in size, with almost no restrictions on content.
Within the communities I frequently visit there are Germans, French, Ukrainians, other fellow Europeans, Indians, Chinese, Indonesians, Japanese, Australians, Americans, Brazilians etc.
The language we commonly use for communication is a mix of British and American English. Theoretically no problem, but practically everyone is using their version of English. This leads to, of course it does, funny situations where pronounciation failed and the entire conversation got unhinged. Like the pronounciation of earth in this short clip. Don’t tell me you did not hear something more… enticing.
Jump over the yada-yada to hear some clips!
Proesmans
Proesmans (prˈusmɑns), my last name, is a bit hard to use internationally. The word has 2 uncommon sounds that make it a challenge to properly articulate in languages other than Flemish (Dutch). Note that American English uses both of these sounds, but remember that there are also non-Americans out in the world. Yes, I’m anti “ALIEN INVASION IN NORTH-AMERICA ONLY”, just joking.
The point of this post is about non-Americans trying to speak English using the sounds of their native language. Some cultures do use the following sounds in their native language, others use a local sound when speaking in English. It’s hilarious, like the above “earth” clip exemplifies, and I have zero issue with any weird pronounciation.
Alveolar trill
Rrrrrrrolling R! There are cultures who use them, others do not. It’s a bit hard to get the sound quite right without training. Even if a person is capable of producing a roll you’re better off not talking much on the telephone with them.
This is a legacy technology thing really; Due to speech compression R’s sometimes get muffled. Most of the time no problem because the receiver has context to reconstruct missing letters, except… when you talk about one-off words like last names, technical terms and uncommon slang.
One day we’ll throw off our joke of backwards compatibility and will relish clear and small sound data thanks to modern audio codecs. Thank you beautiful engineering!
Close back rounded vowel
Food
TODO
Butchering, but not really
I have some clips where people try pronouncing my name. The attempts are actually not bad, almost exactly right, depending on the person. I’m well aware that it takes practice and decided to change my name to something more pronouncable, if you are from Germanic descent that is.
So meet my new alter ego;
Pretzelmans
Apfelstrudelmans
NOTE; Wikipedia tells me that a Pretzel is originally named “Brezel”. Pretzel is an americanization, which surprised me because I literally live a 60 minute drive away from a medium/large German city. Yet, I also use the word Pretzel.
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“I don’t give a penny. Fuck 2020!” - FCK 2020, by Scooter