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Comment by codetrotter | Hacker News Reader

My girlfriend is Spanish. I don’t think her family would be impressed if I were to pronounce “gracias” as “grassy ass” xD

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Yeah, it sounds like Peggy Hill pronouncing Spanish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cByVeZhKmzo

They'd certainly not be impressed; they would understand though.

I just played that sentence in google translator and it sounds like a beginner Spanish speaker that still gets confused by tonic syllables.

Well, if you read it with a Northern English accent like a Mancunian accent it's pretty close!

I swear some people seem to say “grathios” in Spain but it seems to vary so much…

Yeah, Spaniards pronouncing a lot of 's' and 'c' sounds as English 'th' or 'z' is called the ceceo, and it's commonly incorrectly attributed to Spaniards copying a prior king's lisp.

It does kind of sound the same tho? Grassy-ass. Grassiyass. Grassyaas. Gracias.

If you drive from Virginia to Boston, you'll probably hear 5 different pronunciations of "Grassy ass". I don't think any of them sound like how I learned to say "thank you" in high school Spanish class.

True, but it does sound like how they learned to say "thank you" in high school, and how regional dialects can influence the change of language.

Pretty much what it sounds like

No, the "a" vowels are totally different.

"Grassy" and "ass" have the vowel in "bat".

"Gracias" has the vowel in "bot".

Bot is a problematic example, as it has many different pronunciations depending on meaning and region. But non on the common pronunciations have an 'a' (IPA), like Gracias.

True, I was simplifying a bit. Technically "gracias" is /a/ as you point out, while bot is /ɑ/. But /a/ doesn't really exist in General American English, so bot (or bra, as sibling suggests) is the closest on the IPA vowel chart.

I think the a in "bra" works better in your comparison since it has an a.

What's wrong with it? I'm a native speaker of neither, but they do sound similar (of course, gracias being pronounced South American style, not Spanish style). Except the fact that Spanish and English "r" differ, but I think it's reasonable for English speakers to know that, once they learn to pronounce Spanish "r".

English is a stress-timed language whereas Spanish is a syllable-timed language [1] - there's just no way to square that circle pronunciation wise.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrony

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