A casual observation. It seems English gerunds or present participles, such as 'streaming', 'jogging', 'rock climbing', are fairly popular as loan words in other languages. Of course, any part of speech can become a loan word (and English has been a fruitful source of nouns and verbs), but I'm particularly fascinated by the popularity of the gerunds.
A handful of examples - my Russian professor in college spoke with special venom about English loanwords in Russian such as 'jogging' and 'rock climbing.' You can see such an example below:
In Russian, the official is ЛЕДОЛАЗАНИЕ (ledolazanie) but we also have АЙС КЛАЙМИНГ (ais klaiming).
In French, 'going jogging' is 'faire du jogging'.
In Japanese, there is the loan word 'トレーニング' (toreeningu, training) which can be turned into a verb by adding 'suru'.
In Spanish, the word 'streaming' has been borrowed for live digital transmissions, as in 'hacer streaming.'
My interest is in whether gerunds are especially popular as loan words. I can understand borrowing a noun, verb, or adjective, but the present participle of a verb being used as a noun? That's quite specific. No other verbal derivation seems popular. Past participles (bitten, ridden) don't seem to be borrowed much. Verbs are usually borrowed in their dictionary form, not a conjugated form (so no past tense or third person singular).
The simple explanation may be that since gerunds function as nouns ("I love swimming! Climbing is my favorite hobby. Labored breathing is a bad sign."), it doesn't really matter that they were derived from verbs. Gerunds are also very common in English and easy to form.
Why borrow gerunds then? There is a certain cosmopolitan cool factor in English loan words, and English gerunds are quite distinctive. I wonder, though, if it's really just that. I have an inkling gerunds may somehow be more convenient. There is already a word for 'ice climbing' in Russian, so why the English calque?
It is certainly easier to say 'hacer streaming' than to say 'hacer transmision en directo.' It's also much more compact - instead of using a noun phrase with an embedded prepositional phrase, you can just use this shorter noun phrase. (It helps that 'streaming' is a more particular activity than 'transimision en directo', which refers to any live streaming of data. A meteorologist on television may rely on live streaming data, but she is not a 'streamer.')
It may also be a matter of ignorance. If you somehow don't know how to say 'ice climbing' in Spanish ('escalada en hielo') but you know the English for some reason, instead of trying to figure out how you would say it (is there a single word for it, or is it a phrase?), you can just borrow the English and add 'hacer' to it if you need to turn it into a verb. Google search results gives 3 results for 'hacer ice climbing', so it's definitely very rare, but not unprecedented.
The IPA is a pretty good invention, allowing us to transcribe languages with as much precision as we feel is necessary. It's especially useful for language learners, as each IPA character's name is basically an instruction on how to pronounce it. However, you should be careful when it comes to the IPA, because a transcription is not always reality!
To start with a trivial example, consider that the General American English rhotic sound is represented as /r/ in most transcriptions, even though it is not an alveolar trill in any variant. This is for reasons of tradition, convenience ('r' is easier to type than 'ɻ'), and generalization ([ɻ] is not the only realization of the American rhotic, and 'r' is a suitable enough symbol for the rhotic). I doubt anyone has been misled to believe that American English uses an alveolar trill, but it serves as an example of this disconnect between map and territory.
All this to say, if you are trying to learn a new language, it is not enough to just read IPA transcriptions. Practice listening closely to the language.
For example, most IPA transcriptions of Russian /o/ are [o]. If you try to learn Russian pronunciation by referencing a table like this (as I know many autodidacts on the internet do), you may think that Russian has a monophthongal [o] sound, much like Spanish.
It is true that Russian [o] may be monophthongal, but Russian [o] is also often diphthongized! I had noticed this for years in listening to Russian, but it was only by looking up 'Russian o diphthong' and talking to Russian-speaking linguists that I found any sources on it. You'll definitely not find anything on it in beginner textbooks on Russian.
The /o/ vowel is a diphthongoid, with a closer lip rounding at the beginning of the vowel that gets progressively weaker [ᶷo] or even [ᶷɔᶺ], particularly when occurring word-initially or word-finally under the stress, e.g. očen' [ˈᶷoˑt͡ʃjɪn̠ʲ] ‘very’, okna [ˈᶷɔᶺkn̪ə] ‘windows’, moloko [məɫ̪ʌˈkᶷɔᶺ] ‘milk’.
(2015) "Illustrations of the IPA", Yanushevskaya and Bunčić. h/t to prikaz_da
The Swedish sj-sound is a drastic case of IPA misleading. If you have ever heard that the sj-sound is a 'coarticulation of [ʃ] and [x]', you may be entitled to financial compensation! Or at least, linguistic compensation, because it is not actually a coarticulation of [ʃ] and [x]. It's often something much simpler - a voiceless 'wh' [ʍ] (like in Southern American English), a labialized [xʷ], a [ʃ] or [ɕ]. Lindblad even offers up a velarized and labialized labiodental [fˠʷ] as a more likely pronunciation. The video below demonstrates:
I was never able to 'coarticulate' [ʃ] and [x], but a Swedish native speaker once told me that I had a pretty good approximation of 'sj'-sound. My approximation was based not off reading IPA descriptions but off listening to Swedish. I ended up doing something like [çʷ] or [xʷ], because that was what I heard.
This does not mean you shouldn't ever use the IPA a guide. Don't take broad IPA transcriptions as the final word, especially if you are just seeing a table of phonemes. If you notice that you hear something that does not seem to be in the standard IPA transcription, trust your ears! Look for articles on the phonetics of that sound if you can. Many descriptions of languages are old, or put together by someone on Wikipedia, and while there are many great Wikipedia editors, they may make mistakes or omit information for brevity's sake.
I'll finish with a quote from one of my phonetics professors - "write what you heard, not what you think you heard." What are some examples of pronunciations you've noticed that don't match common descriptions of the language?
People who really love one country even though they live in another are nothing new. The Western world has seen bouts of Francophilia and Anglophilia, corresponding with the rise in power of France and England respectively. The popularity of anime and manga around the world have led to a particular form of Japanophilia, whose adherents are derisively called "weeaboos." But despite the power of the United States, we rarely hear anyone talk about 'Americanophilia'. There is no cutesy name for it. Wanting to be American is basically in the water.
The lack of a name hasn't stopped people from commenting on it. The following song, 'Tu vuo fa l'Americano' (You want to play at being American) by Renato Carosone, lightheartedly mocks a Napolitan man who wants to drink whisky and soda, play baseball, and wear jeans with logos on the back pocket. Renato believes it all in vain - "Ma si' nato in Italy!" (but you were born in Italy!). The song is sung in the Napolitan dialect of Italian, making the local pride more evident.
There's just one problem with this rejection of American values - the song itself is written in the genre of jazz, a distinctly American style.
Apparently writing and performing your music in an American genre is fine, but American fashion and drinking habits are a step too far!
Another Italian performer who cribbed from American influences was Adriano Celentano, famous in linguistics circles for writing 'Prisencolinensinainciusol'. This long-titled proto-rap is performed entirely in nonsense lyrics intended to sound like American English. While it's usually presented as a novelty comedy song, Celentano has always emphasized that the song is about the difficulty of communication. This is made clear in the (Italian-langauge) opening to the performance of the song on TV:
There's been a rumor circulating that this song was made to make fun of the way Italians would listen to anything in American English. This is currently the top-voted comment on the most popular upload of the song on YouTube:
DrLimp (2021): At the time english songs were getting great popularity in Italy, Italian singer Adriano Celentano wanted to prove that italians would love everything that sounded remotely english, so he wrote this, proving his point since it was very successful. The reason why it sounds so good even if it's gibberish is because Celantano studied phonetics theory to compose this.
...But in an interview with NPR, Celentano celebrates the American connection:
Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did. So at a certain point, since I like American slang - which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than to sing in Italian - I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn't mean anything.
Side note: it is absolutely hilarious that he believes American 'slang' (referring to Black American English? this blogger also thinks so) is easier to sing than Italian, as Italian was traditionally considered to be the best language to sing in by English speakers. This being due to the prominence of Italian opera. It appears that the language of whichever is the most culturally powerful country is always, somehow, the easiest to sing in.
Nevertheless, the fact that the song became popular enough to hit the top 10 in Italy and some other European countries shows that audiences were probably more receptive to the general sound of American English and the hypnotic beat than to the message of the difficulty of communication. Italian TV-watching audiences might have been aware that the song was about communication, since the school-themed show above was what propelled the song to popularity (per NPR), but I doubt record-buyers would know or care.
What makes 'Prisencolinensinainciusol' sound American? There are many closed syllables: 'eyes', 'red'. There's the use of the retroflex approximant. The consonant and vowel inventory sounds about right. And the prosody is uncanny - I'm reminded of a combo of Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix. The use of a funk background - another Black American genre - also provides the context. Would we still think it sounded 'English'-like if we didn't have the context to prompt us? Someone run the song through one of those AI background-removers and then place the vocal track on top of something entirely non-American-sounding and we'll see.
Let's return back to Carosone and his jazzy plead to stop wearing hats tilted on side. Why can't we call the young man an Ameriphile, or an Americophile, or an Americanophile? (Yes, I've looked them all up, and it appears there's no standard.) I'd venture to say it's because American pop culture is so dominant worldwide (one could even call it hegemony) that one can't even point it out. Everyone has their limit as to what's too much American culture - Celentano seems to have no problem producing pseudo-American sounds, while Carosone will accept the music, but not the hobbies. I wonder what Carosone would say if asked why he decided to record this riposte in jazz. As a performer of traditional Napolitan music, as well as someone who has stepped into various diverse genres, he may have chosen jazz to show his flexibility as well as add an extra jab at the American-obsessed fellow. But hearing a jazzy song chide someone for Ameriphilia doesn't sound like an ironic twist. It doesn't even sound like much at all, so accustomed are we to American genres.
If we might grant that Carosone may have intended a bit of irony or hypocrisy in choosing a jazz setting for the song, then the following cover of the song, 'Ty hochesh' byt' Amerikantsem' by Zhanna Friske, lacks any of this tension. This song comes from a New Year's Eve performance on television, New Year's being an important holiday in Russia. Many television programs will have performers come on and do covers and skits. This one centers on a man who rudely walks into an establishment and demands an 'Americano' coffee, at which point the waitress, Friske, asks him if he really wants an 'Americano'. This song is less about Ameriphilia replacing native culture and more about the false idea that the United States is a land of plenty, where sociopaths can become rich and step on their enemies (unlike Russia, of course). She instead portends that he'll end up fat, overworked, and disappointed at how ugly American women are. The man recants and chooses to drink tea instead.
Meanwhile, the music is still stubbornly American. The genre remains jazz, but more of a Broadway take on jazz. She's dressed less like a waitress and more like a Bohemian showgirl. Her moves and backup dancers are obviously inspired by 40s-era Broadway shows. Once again, we have the curiosity of using American pop-cultural forms to decry American values. And if Carosone still has credibility as someone who made his career in traditional music, Zhanna has none of that as a pop star dabbling in various types of synth-pop. She's even embraced cosmopolitanism in her song 'Zhanna Friske' where she brags that the man of her desire will be "leaving in English with Zhanna Friske."
Both attempts at criticizing Ameriphilia remain boxed in due to their small scope. If we take Zhanna's version seriously, then it's fine to enjoy American-style cultural artifacts so long as you do them within Russia and you don't get it in your head that the United States is in any way a better country than Russia. If we take Carosone's version seriously, then the problem is being too obvious and naked in your Ameriphilia - if you're going to enjoy American stuff, at least be prudent about it and don't do it all at once. Friske's version is more political where Carosone's is cultural, but both cede that mass media must take place, if not in the language of American English, then in the genre of American music.
Am I reading too much into two lighthearted comedy songs? Yes, absolutely. But it's been on my mind for a while, this contradiction between a song making fun of Ameriphilia being, at the same time, in an American musical genre. It's like making a j-pop song about how silly being a weeaboo is. Only, not even then, because Japanese pop culture has nowhere near the reach that American pop culture has, that has allowed American pop culture to institute itself as a naturalized standard. It'd be more like if we lived in an alternate universe where 'weeaboo' wasn't a word, everyone listened to j-pop, but wearing kimono on the street was seen as gauche and taking it too far.
I like listening to songs in languages other than English, and on occasion these songs will borrow words or even entire phrases from other languages. This type of code-switching can happen for many reasons, but usually it doesn't involve any sense of lyricality to it: you were in one language, and now you are in another. This isn't always the case, though. Some songwriters try to make a rhyme or a pun between two languages. Here are a couple of examples of cross-language wordplay.
"Baddest Girl In Town - Pitbull" (Spanish/English)
Baila, dejame ver como tu mueves la salla
Ella es candela, fuego, fire
Dance, let me see how you move your skirt, she's a flame, fire, "fire"
The reggaeton genre features a fair amount of code-switching between English and Spanish, since it's not uncommon for singers to be bilingual. Here Pitbull shows a rhyme between "salla" (skirt) and "fire", pronounced with a non-rhotic accent. [aja] is a common sound sequence in Spanish, and English words ending in -ire can be pronounced non-rhotically to sound close enough to rhyme. Another example of a song using this rhyme is "Summer's Not Hot" by Selena Gomez, which goes:
The temperature is 99 and it can't get much higher, so come on over Romeo, and vamos a la playa (let's go to the beach)
"Shape of You - Ndlovu Youth Choir" (Zulu/English)
Ngamshaya ngo 'hi' yena wangshaya nge 'smile'
(I said hi, and she hit me with a smile)
This song features a fair amount of borrowing from English, some of it being lyrics from the original English version and some being original. This line has a lot of assonance, and like the Pitbull example, relies on the [aja] sequence. I especially like the combo of 'hi yena', which seamlessly puts an English word into a Zulu construction to continue the assonance. 'Smile' is pronounced with the diphthong broken into two syllables, as in 'smi-yul'.
"I am the Best - 2NE1" (Korean/English)
Geondeurimyeon gamdang mothae I'm hot-hot-hot, hot fire
Dwijibeojigi jeone jebal nuga nal jom mallyeo
(If you touch me you won't be able to handle it, I'm hot, hot, hot, hot fire)
(Before I flip something over, Please, can someone stop me?)
Here we have another 'fire' example (no English word has contributed as much to songwriting as 'fire'), but the rhyme is more slant than straight. 'fire' is still pronounced nonrhotically as [faja] but it's being rhymed with 'mallyeo' [maljʌ]. It's not unusual for k-pop songs to prefer inexact rhymes over direct rhymes. We can see another example of this Korean-English loose rhyme in the following lyric, where 'yaegi' [jɛgi] is rhymed with 'baby' [beibi]:
Eotteon bigyodo nan geobuhae igeon gyeomsonhan yaegi
Gachireul nonhajamyeon naneun Billion dollar, baby
(I refuse to be compared, I'm telling you the truth)
(If we're talking about my value, I'm a billion dollar baby)
Я не говорю про юмор, bitch, но мы shoot'им
Ya nye govoryu pro yumor bitch no my shutim
I'm not talking about humor, bitch, but we're joking/shooting
This one isn't a rhyme, but a pun. The Russian word for 'we're joking' is 'shutim', which sounds as if it had the English word 'shoot' in it. This leads to a pun on both the immediate theme of humor and the song title, 'my kalashnikov'.
"KAWAII - Tatarka" (Tatar/English)
Яңгыр ява, тама тамчы, Чылана минем Versace, She is cutie, she's almighty, You will never ever catcha
yaņgyr yava tama tamchy, chylana minem Versace, she is cutie, she's almighty, you will never ever catcha
It's raining cats and dogs, soaked my Versace, she is cutie, she's almighty, you will never ever catcha
Finally, a Tatar selection. Though 'Versace' is an Italian name, it's pronounced 'Versachy' as it usually is in English. The rhyme is for 'tamchy' [tamtʃɤ], Versace [versatʃi], and catcha (catch her) [katʃa].
Common themes in the English words being pronounced is a relatively simple consonant structure: 'fire' CVCV, 'baby' CVCV, 'shoot' CVC, 'catcha' CVCV. The most complicated words were 'smile', CCVCVC and and 'Versace', CVCCVCV. Not all languages allow for the types of consonants clusters English allows (e.g. 'strengths', 'strum', 'fixed'), so words with fewer consonant clusters are more likely to rhyme across languages.
Similarly, vowels were kept simple: [ai], [ei], [u]. Tatarka pronounced the /æ/ in 'Versace' and 'catcha' as [a], which made vowel repetition easier. English also has a high number of possible vowels, so it's not a surprise that words with the 5 cardinal vowels should be easier to rhyme and pun on cross-linguistically. I'd like to find examples of cross-language rhymes with rarer English words.
I have spoken about glide affrication before - the process that makes "y" sound like "j" and "w" sound like "v." But did you know there's also affrication of stops in English? It makes "t" sound like "ts" and "d" sound like "dz." It can also make "k" sound like "khhh" and "p" like "pf".
What causes stop affrication? Well, it's a natural result of 'lengthening' a stop. A stop, by definition, is when a bunch of air builds up behind part of your mouth and is then suddenly released, causing a 'pop' sound. How can you lengthen this release of air? You can't, but you can continue pushing air from the lungs through, which causes a friction - hence affriccation. You can think of it like a stop combined with a fricative that's formed at the same part of the mouth.
Wells's Accents of English associates this sort of affrication with Cockney English speakers. But I've found examples of it across different dialectal regions. Like S-retraction, it seems to be a change that has developed multiple times in different places.
From New York City - musicians as distinct as Latin pop singer Ricky Martin and j-pop singer Utada Hikaru have d-affrication. Utada's example is especially song. (I recommend headphones to be able to hear the frication more clearly compared to the music.)
Her lips are dzevil red
The dzaily things
Billy Joel also has t-affrication at the end of a word:
If that's what it's all abouts, mama if that's movin' up, then I'm movin' outs... mmm I'm movin' outs.
Over in California, Disney Channel child actress Emily Osment (from Hannah Montana) has some dramatic d-affrication:
Dzoesn't matter what you say, I'm knockin' you dzown, dzown, dzown
And in Texas, fellow Disney Channel alum and singer Demi Lovato has some d-affrication, though not consistently (audio slowed down):
Are you kidding me? I'm so not a dziva
In the Midwest, the lead singer of the rock band Fallout Boy, Patrick Stump, frequently uses affrication in his music. Sometimes it's from lengthening the consonant. Compare the 'k' in 'mistakhhh' to the simply released 'k' in 'take':
And just one mistakhh is all it will take
Stump also seems to display a curious case of p-affrication where 'proof' sounds like 'pfroof' (at least, the official lyrics are 'proof'). This has led multiple fans and lyrics sites to mistakenly hear the lyric as "frozen fruit."
And here's the frozen pfroof
Some of these examples seem to result from attempting to 'extend' a stop consonant (Stump's "mistakkhe"). Some might result due to being near a front vowel, like Demi Lovato's "dziva." This sort of affrication before front vowels also happens in Canadian French (audio slowed down):
La fondation Celine Dzion
A similar thing happens in Russian. In Russian, oral stops that are palatalized (pronounced with the tongue raised, as if prepared for a 'yuh' [j] sound) also have some frication (source.
Affrication can progress even further to become lenition, so that the 'stop' component disappears completely. In Liverpool English, this can result in 'khh' simple sounding like a sharp 'hhh' [x]. The following clip was originally found via Dialect Blog and shows the [x] appearing in Liverpool footballer Steven Gerrard's speech.
Every player is loohing (looking) forward
I have [dz] as an allophone of /d/ in my speech. I especially have it at the beginning of a syllable, not at the end. Do you have any stop-affrication? What about stop-lenition? Are there any other examples you are familiar with, cross-dialectally or cross-linguistically?
