22562: DeGraff: Re: 22557: Mambo Racine responding again to spelling of "Mambo" - Re: 22524: (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Michel DeGraff <degraff@MIT.EDU>


> It has nothing to do with whether the person is a Creole linguist either -
> the fact is that the word is pronounced MAM-bo, both "m's" are
> pronounced.  Come to Jacmel!  Point at me.  Ask, "Who is that
> woman?"  Most people here know me,  they will say to you, "Mambo
> Kati", MAM-bo KA-ti.  The "th" sound they can't pronounce, but the
> M's, certainly.

Let's take this report at face value.  The pronunciation "MAM-bo
KA-ti" with stress on the first syllable of each word, as in English,
clearly violates the rules of Haitian Creole phonology.  Creole stress
patterns are different from English stress patterns. In bona fide
Haitian Creole words (e.g., "Manbo" and "Mari"), the stress goes on
the last syllable (e.g., "man-BO ma-RI").  That Grey would without any
hesitation assume, among other erroneous things, that the stress
pattern in "MAM-bo KA-ti" conforms to Haitian Creole phonology shows
that her pronunciation of Haitian Creole is totally inadequate and,
not surprisingly, influenced by English.  Now imagine an
English-language "expert" who would claim that the only correct way to
pronounce "Kathy" is "ka-TI" with stress on the second syllable as in
Haitian Creole!?!

At best, what Grey reports above is how some Haitians in Jacmel would
pronounce "Mambo Kati" in the English-like way that Grey herself
pronounces it.  This is not surprising.  There is a vast linguistic
literature on a related and larger set of phenomena that fall under
the label "accommodation" whereby speakers, for various
sociolinguistic reasons, try to "accommodate" (e.g., reproduce) their
interlocutors' speech patterns, even if these patterns are quite
distinct from their own.  So if some Jacmel people hear Grey regularly
call herself something like "MAM-bo KA-ti" with an English accent,
then they themselves may reproduce it in their own speech, in
"deference" (so to speak) for "Mambo Kathy" who doesn't know any
better. Hypothetically these same Jacmel speakers would turn around
and say "man-BO ma-RI" when addressing Manbo Mari who is a native
Haitian.  Another related phenomenon is what linguists have called
"Foreigner Talk" which includes the way in which native speakers would
sometimes modify their speech patterns in order to accommodate the
linguistic (in)competence of foreigners.

More generally, it's a well-known fact, and it's quite usual, that
foreigners who've learnt a second language relatively late in life are
influenced by their native language when speaking that second language
and often cannot perceive and reproduce all the nuances in that second
language.  So, for example, we routinely find adult Japanese learners
of English who are not able to hear and produce the phonological
difference between the words "surprise" and "supplies".  Grey herself
mentions "[t]he "th" sound [that certain Haitians] can't pronounce".
So it's not surprising that there are certain Haitian sound patterns
that non-fluent foreigners cannot perceive and/or pronounce (e.g., the
correct pronunciation of "manbo"). Neither is it surprising that Grey
would be influenced by English phonology when trying to speak Haitian
Creole.  Similar examples abound for a variety of language learners.

What's rather unusual is to find foreigners who've learnt a second
language late in life who pose as "experts" on that second language
and try to impose their erroneous pronunciation and spelling on native
speakers, including linguists who've spent years studying their native
language.

Then again, this is Haiti, "the best nightmare on earth", where the
most incompetent interlopers can pass for linguists, anthropologists,
theologists, historians, sociologists, economists, political
scientists, etc.

                                 -michel.

P.S. For those of you who'd like to believe that Grey is being
unfairly maligned on "pathetic" grounds of (mis)spellings, it must be
remembered that it's Grey herself who started the first
(mis)spelling-bee round against Angela Nonvayon and it's gone downhill
since.  (See my re-post a couple of days ago from the 2000 archives.)
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