22614: DeGraff: Re: 22612: Vishnusurf: Re: 22609: DeGraff on Ms. Grey's linguistic claims (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Michel DeGraff <degraff@MIT.EDU>


There is so much that's wrong in Vishnusurf's posting, but time is
limited...

> there is still an "M" pronounced at the transition to the second
> syllable in "manbo".

That may be true for English, but this is not the case for Haitian Creole.

> degraff's use of the word "manma" for comparison is not very helpful
> here, for the second M is already pronounced by virtue of the second
> M in the word...

The point, admittedly not made clearly, is that there is neither a
consonant "n", nor a consonant "m" at the _end_ of either syllable in
"manman", and the same is true of "man-BO" and "man-BA".  There is no
"m pronounced at the transition to the second syllable in "man-MAN".
Ditto in "man-BO" and "man-BA".

> i would suggest "manba" instead as a measure... do we not say,
> phonetically, mam-BA and not maBA, however nasalized we make the "an"?

Absolutely not.  See Guy Antoine's recent posting: "man-BA" like
"man-BO" has no consonant "n", pronounced as such, anywhere in the word.

Good English-speaking learners of Haitian Creole---such learners seem
so rare on this list---would try to stop confusing their English-like
pronunciation of Haitian Creole with the actual pronunciation of
Haitian Creole by native Haitian speakers like myself and millions of
other Haitians.  That way they could, at last, get rid of their
English-influenced interference and make progress on their Creole---or
at least they would stop displaying so shamelessly their incompetence
and arrogance.

> if degraff is right, then the word manbo is actually pronounced somthing
> like "mangBO", and that is not how fattier has it.

Here too Vishnusurf is wrong.  And Fattier is right, and it would be
for her to _not_ be right: she's an excellent linguist working with
recorded samples of Haitian Creole speech, including speech from the
region of Jacmel.  And after all, we're dealing with a two-syllable
word, nothing as complicated that many Haitians, including those on
this list, say routinely, many times a week---so this is not nuclear
physics.  Again, the first syllable (with no stress) is: consonant "m"
followed by the nasalized counterpart of "a" indicated by "an". And
the second syllable (with stress) is: consonant "b" followed by vowel "o".
Shall everyone now repeat after me: "man-BO"?

The reason why so many English speakers, including those on the
Corbett list, have problems with processing and producing this Haitian
Creole word correctly is that in English there is rarely, if ever,
such a nasal vowel in syllable-final position, as in the first
syllable of "man-BA", "man-BO", "man-MAN", etc.  So we get from these
second-language learners of Haitian Creole the (naturally expected)
problems of interference from English as a native language for these
speakers to Haitian Creole as a second-language.  And this is made
worse when these speakers refuse to learn because they mistakenly
think that they already know such, as if Haitian Creole was an
exceptionally simple language that any second-rate second-language
learners could learn to speak natively with little time and effort.

Again this is all quite banale, really.  What's less banale, although
part of a larger expected schema of (neo-)colonialism, is that some of
the foreigners on the Corbett List and elsewhere can so easily believe
that they can become "expert" in a language they don't, and can't,
speak natively and then try to publicly teach its fine nuances of
pronunciation to its very native speakers, some of whom have been
trained over many years to analyze languages as scientific objects of
study.

But that phenomenon too (non-fluent foreigners who present themselves
as "experts" no matter how limited they competence actually is) is
worth of study---for anthropologists, sociologists, postcolonialist
scholars, etc.  This phenomenon has repeated itself throughout Haiti's
history. So in essence this discussion is providing yet another set of
interesting "data" on Haiti.

                                 -michel.
___________________________________________________________________________
MIT Linguistics & Philosophy, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge MA 02139-4307
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