Difficult time understanding Indian accents

capt_mahajan

or nun of the above

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Nick-H

Please don't monk-ey around!

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Dilliwala

I was wondering when someone would bring this up.
This is true, as per my askoxford link - altho I don't know about the pronoun.., pronun.., er - what Nick wrote.
And it's not a word, it's the name of an actual ge.. umm, one of those thingies that spouts hot water out of the ground.

capt_mahajan

thats munkey

Nick-H

Oh, would it?

As in chipmunks?

machadinha

Yes, of course, quite. I've been thinking of how to describe how we would pronounce it here, but it's kind of difficult. There are a couple of sounds involved that English simply doesn't have.

Something like (c)heyser I guess. But that's not really it. A decent dictionary which you seem to be fond of should give you pronunciation instructions. Except I can't read them.

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dzibead

After some poking around on the web, I found that the thingie that spouts water from the ground is also usually pronounced "guy-zer" (the "American" way) even in England, but the apparatus that heats water is usually pronounced "gee-zer", even though it's spelled the same as the other thing. Those daft Brits! (By the way, do they even have geysirs (guy-zers) anywhere in the UK???

It's actually just a "hard g" sound in Icelandic, not one of those weird Scandinavian phonemes like the "kj" thing that sounds sort of "slushy" to me. I know this because among my many useless talents is knowing Old Icelandic, which is practically indistinguishable from Modern Icelandic (well, I used to know it, anyway - I'm not sure I could pass an exam now).

Nick-H

There's the Trafalgar Square Hot Springs. A favourite haunt of the London city worker on a cold day; stripping off and enjoying the steam.

Or was that pigeons?

machadinha

Er, well, that's good enough to get a hats off from here, Dzi. They used to have some interesting social arrangements btw. Are you aware of Harold Barclay's People Without Government? Might interest you.

Anyway I was referring to the Dutch pronunciation. No idea what the original might be like, although I suspect not so widely divergent. And that soft (or even hard, or anything inbetween) G is just impossible to explain in the abstract to anyone who's not used to it and doesn't know phonetic notation. And I don't.

Aishah

I am impressed Dzibead! Yes, that 'guy-ser' was the spouting out of the ground one and this is the way we pronounce it! As for geezers - well I started pronouncing it the same way as before but quickly had to adapt to 'geezer' (bathroom contraption) because no one knew what I was talking about.

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camelgirl

Wow Dzi, I'm also impressed! Old Icelandic--awesome! I thought Icelandic was like Norwegian (didn't they come from there?)

I'm with Aishah--we have a famous GUYzer here in the US called "old faithful" (it faithfully does it's geyser thing on a schedule), and I never heard of a geezer (besides actually now being one ) until I went to India & met the bathroom contraption.

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dzibead

I'm not familiar with it. I'll have to check it out. They had a very unstructured parliament kind of thing ... which they called the "Thing", by the way ... that's the actual Icelandic word. Sort of like the Romans, come to think of it: the "res publica" - the "public thing" = republic

Heh. Isn't Dutch just English with a charming accent?

Well, the things one picks up in graduate school while trying to avoid finishing the degree and having to look for a non-existent job ...
It is similar. In the Middle Ages, the language spoken in Norway and Iceland was the same, for the reason you note: the Icelanders emigrated from Norway. In fact, what I've referred to here as Old Icelandic is also called Old Norse and was the language throughout medieval Scandinavia. In Iceland the language sort of froze (no pun intended) in its older form, but it evolved more on the Scandinavian mainland and developed into Modern Swedish, Danish and Norwegian.

We have a "Geyserville" in California about an hour from where I live, and there are indeed geysers in the area, which also erupt on some kind of schedule, but they're not as spectacular as Old Faithful. I suppose there's a chance of geysers anywhere there's still volcanic activity and earthquakes - geothermal hotspots. We have a lot of geezers here, too, of the variety noted by camelgirl. Have not seen one of the the other kind outside of India and the UK ...

shere

The Indian accent is fast fading and being replaced by a pseudo american accent.

All the call centre staff I ever get through to have this american accent.