Czech is my mother tongue and I have regular issues with this too (have been mainly English speaking for the last 10 years). Czech does not have a /w/ sound and it confuses me the other way as well, like you said with "victory".
My friend from Czechia struggled while pronouncing Polish words including /w/ sound represented by "ł" letter.
What I find interesting is that /w/ sound
> V západoslovanských jazycích navazuje na praslovanskou nonpalatální souhlásku [ɫ]
which is still partially present in the eastern regions of Poland and is associated with sort of "sophisticated" pronunciation used by early 20th century actors - and thus it's also known as "performative ł" or "kresowe ł", or "dark l" in English. It is similar to Arabic "l" present in Allah word.
Hindi uses the sound /ʋ/ which is a sound with elements of both v and w. This means that to many Indians, v and w are allophonic: they are heard as the same sound.
An example of allophony in English is the aspirated /pʰ/ in pin and the unaspirated /p/ in spin, which to a speaker of Hindi and many other languages would be considered two distinct sounds.
I’m not American, but I after living here - I’ve noticed a few. They sometimes say “axe” for “ask”. They fail to enunciate “respiratory” fully - they say “res-pah-tory”. Also, they fail to pronounce the f in fifth - like they say fith. Certain words like “squirrel” tend to get squished into “skwol” while I’m used to pronouncing it in two syllables. I’m trying to think of similar examples.
Edit : I now realise that all of the above are incorrect examples in the context of what is being discussed. Pardon me!
In many Slavic languages there's a concept of "soft" and "hard" consonants. In Russian and Ukrainian, for example, whether the consonant is of either kind is determined by either the vowel that follows it or a special other letter, or, in case of Ukrainian, an apostrophe. In Polish, there's a diacritic sign for the same purpose, which is for some reason reversed for L.
Anyways. The example that is very tricky to get right for an English speaker in Russian is:
Oh, and in Hebrew, while it's not acknowledged by the speakers themselves, there's also two different ways to pronounce "L" ("lamed"), while English speakers only utilize one of the two ways. So, they manage to say "lomed" (לומד, studies) more or less correctly, but "lo" (לא, no) sounds funny to a native speaker, because the "L" is supposed to be "soft".
Native English speakers when trying to speak Portuguese find it hard to speak A with tilde (~). Like when they say "São Paulo" they say "Sao Paulo". Ã is the nasal A, which sounds like the U in "sun" and "burn", while the standard A sounds the same as in "car".
I don't know why this happens, since the phoneme exists in English...
Well as an English speaker i can tell you when I see symbols around or attached to an otherwise “normal” looking letter and I don’t know how they modify the sound then I just ignore those modifications. I mean, what other choice do we have, if you don’t know how it modifies the sound you can either guess randomly or stick with what you know haha.
So in other words, those English speakers likely don’t know what the tilde means.
No, we have both those sounds and clear indication on where and how those sounds are made. In our case it's not really confusing. When someone learns English, like I did, there is no way to know what sound will occur where other than just sucking it up as "well, you will know it when you hear it and remember that or get used to speaking like that".
"avtar" (w; we would have totally spelled it "Awatar" - I see you Cameron) and "vikas" (v; something our PM got us loads of) have two distinct व sounds and it is phonetic and we don't have to memorise it when we make these sounds. The problem is English keeps coming to us over the years while we take our sweet time in getting used to this pronunciation and spelling monstrosity. Another reason could be, not everyone went to schools where English with strict pronunciation was a focus or even a nudge.
This was to your
> I don’t know why
And I don't know where you are from but if you are from the "English west", I am pretty sure you mispronounce "Gandhi" like "Gendi" or "Geyndii" and been doing it for decades without bothering to even learn it. "I don't know why" :)
I recognise the frustration in this comment and it’s not fair that Indians were singled out, especially because of how few English speakers speak native Indian dialects
What’s interesting about the comment though is that to the native English speaking ear the ‘v’ in ‘Avatar’ is definitely not pronounced ‘w’. I would say this confusion points to a difference in how the sounds are differentiated in the native dialects. Similar (but to a lesser degree) to how a native English speaker would struggle to ‘hear’ sounds in a tonal language that they didn’t speak natively
I apologise, I didn’t mean to single us out. I’m a native Tamil speaking Indian raised in Chennai. I used to make the v w switch as a child and someone corrected me. Ever since then, I notice others making it and considered it peculiar and interesting. I never attributed it to distinct ‘va’ sounds in our local languages but just figured we learned English incorrectly.
Hey, I was being playfully terse but I should have been more polite. But I did assume you were from the "English west" and now that you are not I specifically take my words about pronouncing "Gandhi" back :D
PS. Tamil is my second most favourite "not known by me" Indian language for the way it sounds, especially in old songs and some new songs (and yes, I don't understand a single word of it).
Hah all cool. Tamil is a hard language. I have both Tamil parents and my mum failed so badly at Tamil in school- she insisted that I take Hindi in school. But none of us speak it, so I can read and write Hindi but can’t speak it well. I speak Tamil but can’t read or write a word. Also I essentially know madras Tamil which is about the worst version of it. By Tamil standards, I have the equivalent of a truckers mouth. I know the language the works well at a TASMAC wine shop.
tndibona · · focus · HN ↗
frantathefranta · · focus · HN ↗
pndy · · focus · HN ↗
What I find interesting is that /w/ sound
> V západoslovanských jazycích navazuje na praslovanskou nonpalatální souhlásku [ɫ]
which is still partially present in the eastern regions of Poland and is associated with sort of "sophisticated" pronunciation used by early 20th century actors - and thus it's also known as "performative ł" or "kresowe ł", or "dark l" in English. It is similar to Arabic "l" present in Allah word.
zarzavat · · focus · HN ↗
An example of allophony in English is the aspirated /pʰ/ in pin and the unaspirated /p/ in spin, which to a speaker of Hindi and many other languages would be considered two distinct sounds.
left-struck · · focus · HN ↗
tndibona · · focus · HN ↗
Edit : I now realise that all of the above are incorrect examples in the context of what is being discussed. Pardon me!
chuckadams · · focus · HN ↗
Jimmy Carter pronounced it "Nook-ler". And he used to serve on a nookler submarine.
tndibona · · focus · HN ↗
crabbone · · focus · HN ↗
Anyways. The example that is very tricky to get right for an English speaker in Russian is:
All four words usually sound the same to an English speaker. It's usually easier to tell the first two from the last two.crabbone · · focus · HN ↗
lucasoshiro · · focus · HN ↗
I don't know why this happens, since the phoneme exists in English...
left-struck · · focus · HN ↗
So in other words, those English speakers likely don’t know what the tilde means.
crossroadsguy · · focus · HN ↗
"avtar" (w; we would have totally spelled it "Awatar" - I see you Cameron) and "vikas" (v; something our PM got us loads of) have two distinct व sounds and it is phonetic and we don't have to memorise it when we make these sounds. The problem is English keeps coming to us over the years while we take our sweet time in getting used to this pronunciation and spelling monstrosity. Another reason could be, not everyone went to schools where English with strict pronunciation was a focus or even a nudge.
This was to your
> I don’t know why
And I don't know where you are from but if you are from the "English west", I am pretty sure you mispronounce "Gandhi" like "Gendi" or "Geyndii" and been doing it for decades without bothering to even learn it. "I don't know why" :)
oharapj · · focus · HN ↗
What’s interesting about the comment though is that to the native English speaking ear the ‘v’ in ‘Avatar’ is definitely not pronounced ‘w’. I would say this confusion points to a difference in how the sounds are differentiated in the native dialects. Similar (but to a lesser degree) to how a native English speaker would struggle to ‘hear’ sounds in a tonal language that they didn’t speak natively
tndibona · · focus · HN ↗
crossroadsguy · · focus · HN ↗
PS. Tamil is my second most favourite "not known by me" Indian language for the way it sounds, especially in old songs and some new songs (and yes, I don't understand a single word of it).
tndibona · · focus · HN ↗