The directed graph of stereotypical incomprehensibility (2009) | Hacker News Reader

The directed graph of stereotypical incomprehensibility (2009)

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

36 pointsnvr21916 comments

The oddest conversation I've had, had to go anti-clockwise around a circle of three people, because although we were all speaking English, everyone had a very different idea of English. Everyone in the conversation could understand someone, and everyone could be understood by someone, but no two of us were mutually intelligible.

We were in Singapore, in the jungle, a long time ago when there was still jungle in Singapore.

I was speaking speaking somewhat Californian-ed Australian English.

An extremely well dressed Indian man in a white blazer with an elegant hat over movie star hair - was speaking Indian English with deep baritone vowels that were perfectly clear to me, but he understood nothing I said.

An elderly Chinese in working clothes carrying a machete and plastic bags full of produce from her garden. Her speaking rhythm and stress were completely opaque to me - but she understood me perfectly. She couldn't understand the Indian man at all, but understood her clearly.

I'd asked her for directions, and she'd waved the Indian man over, and we ended chatting for about 20 mins going round the circle.

That's not so uncommon in Singapore (even today that there is definitely less jungle than what I wish there was). Everybody speaks English, but they all carry over their native language phonetics, which is wonderful, especially for the older chinese.

Chinese dialects are tonal, and they somehow manage to carry over the tonality when speaking English, so I had to learn how to pronounce my address in the specific way that taxi driver uncles could understand.

As for me (I'm a Greek), I have found that the most comprehensible English are spoken by Malays and Indonesians, just because their native phonetics somehow happen to match mine.

I especially love the way Indonesians pronounce 'r' - it's a REAL 'r', and it's always a rolling triplet, sounding like "rrr", instead of that thing between "w" and nothingness that English has managed to mutilate a perfectly nice consonant into :D

TYPOS: meant to say elderly Chinese [woman] ... She couldn't understand the Indian man at all, but [ he ] understood her clearly.

Interesting that the graph is acyclic. I wonder if it's just a coincidence or if there's some connection to the historical trajectory of cultural transmission or to language evolution or something?

Perhaps only because it's incomplete? Like, is there no such expression in terminal nodes Hindi or in Javanese--or in the hundreds of other languages spoken today?

At the end of the post, there's a link to an updated and larger graph that does have some cycles.

Alas, my linguistics career was over before it started.

I have to admit that i dont have a good idea of what greek sounds like.

So would you say it's Greek to you?

I mostly learned what it sounded like because of a stats professor who was from Greece. He frequently complained of the way people (in academia in the US) pronounced Greek letters. Still not being too familiar with Greek, I'm not sure if the pronunciation issues were local (his regional dialect versus some "international" or standard dialect) or temporal (modern Greek pronunciation versus a classical pronunciation, which itself would have been filtered through Western European languages and cultures).

Not really. Although Greek has several local dialects, the pronunciation variations across the Greek population are relatively small (no matter that we always exaggerate them for effect).

Plus, no one really knows what the "classical" pronunciations sounded like. We can make some educated guesses from the tonal symbols that older Greek used to use to guide pronunciation, but that's all.

Most differences on pronunciation that your stats professor has been complaining for could just be accounted by normal differences in phonetics by people trying to casually pronounce some Greek words or letters.

There's also some mismatching caused by the way the modern Greek alphabet and phonetics are mapped into Latin - take for example the second letter of the alphabet, "Beta". In Modern Greek it sounds like the latin V (and the letter's name is actually pronounced "Vita" - "vi" as in "video". There are several other mismatches like this which makes it very easy for a Western speaker to pronounce Greek letters and words incorrectly

English pronunciation of Greek letters is indeed quite different from modern Greek pronunciation, but it's not necessarily because English is "wrong" but because of historical attempts to pronounce the letters like the Ancient Greeks did.

For instance, in English we pronounce the letter μ as "mew" ([Mju]). In modern Greek, μ is pronounced "Me" or [Mi] (spelled as μι). Here is a YouTube video of a Greek person going through the alphabet, linked to μ. [1]

However, it's thought that "mew" is probably closer to the Ancient Greek pronunciation (Wikipedia shows the Ancient Greek phonetics as [mŷː] where ŷː is like "few" [2]).

More to the point, though, the English pronunciation of Greek letters was fixed around the 16th century (see [3] for a tiny bit of history) and was an attempt to use the classical Greek pronunciations, though probably not a very successful one.

Likewise π is pronounced differently in modern Greek, where it pronounced like "pee," not "pie," and so would make π-day a very different holiday...

1. https://youtu.be/P85PXR6deIw?t=214

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(letter)

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_Ancient_Greek...

Alright, here [0] is a news report that I'm pretty confident is presented in greek. I sometimes work to foreign BBC News channels [1], so it is a human voice I don't understand.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqZq2JzmF14

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/BBCNews/channels

The clip in [0] is standard Modern Greek with a cavaet - the pronounciation of TV anchormans tend to be quite distinctive, as they usually over-stress their tonality for comprehensibility. If you hear Greeks in a casual conversation it's a bit more dull than that.

Well of course in English the expression "it's all Greek to me" is a bastardized Shakespeare quote. presumably it could just as easily have been some other language.

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