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February 16, 2008
The T-H Transposition Error
As students of Spanish, English-speakers have a few shared errors that are so common that they get names, like yoísmo, the tendency to overuse the first person singular pronoun when it is not necessary. Spanish tends to omit pronouns because they are made redundant by the conjugated forms of verbs, but they are rarely omitted in English.
From a Spanish-speaker's perspective, English has a lot of funky ways to write various phonological units. That is, to make the sound like the "oo" in "tool," they use the letter U and only the letter U. In English, this sound appears in written contexts like "oo," "u," or even "ue." At the same time, these are not consistent, as the "oo" in "look" is not pronounced like the "oo" in "tool." The whole English pronunciation thing can be very, very difficult for people who learn it as a second language.
Vowels are hard enough. Silent letters are completely stupid, at least from a learner's point of view. Native speakers do not think twice about them because they grew up using them, but for a student of the language, they can cause lots of problems. In Spanish, the letter H is silent, like it is in many (but not all) cases in English. Native Spanish-speakers can grasp the idea that in words like "height" and "rhapsody," but they often get it confused with the TH digraph, which has four possible different sounds: the voiced dental fricative, as in "this," the voiceless dental fricative, as in "thing," with a silent H resulting in just a T sound, as in "Thailand," and a consonant cluster where both the T and the H are their own independent sounds, as in "lighthouse."
As a student of a foreign language myself, it isn't nice of me to laugh at mistakes others make with a language I lucked out in learning by growing up with it. Yet it's hard not to chuckle when it happens, no matter who you are. I'm sure even the most well-meaning and encouraging Spanish speakers have to laugh when a student of their language gets pregnant simply saying something incorrectly or making a social faux pas. Nobody thinks the person making that mistake is stupid, merely human and showing their native language bias in the interpretation of the secondary language. It is just being human to see the humor when someone else evidences their humanity. It shows us we're all in the same boat.
It is especially funny when someone is so human on a grand scale, like when there are mistakes on product packaging or on billboards or banners out in front of restaurants. Because English is seen as classy here for some reason that I have yet to fully grasp, businesses use it to give their establishment an air of refinement or something. I guess the same is done in the United States, where you see a roadside stand in Nebraska calling itself a "shoppe" of some sort, even though nobody in the midwest would normally write it that way. At least I hope they wouldn't.
One sees a lot of signs and labels here that are printed with some English, and it is particularly odd when they are half in Spanish and half in English. I don't mean they are bilingual and have the same information in Spanish and English both. I mean they will have the name of the product or store in English, and maybe slogan too. But then the descriptor of what the thing or place is (a carbonated beverage or a convenience store) is written in Spanish. Shawn tells me this is also done a lot in Japan, resulting in great hilarity.
Here in Mexico, Shawn and I never cease to be amused by the signs which reflect the Spanish-speaker's confusion with the TH digraph. Most recently, we got a chuckle out of:
Monday Nigth Football
Yet we are always amused by the appearance of:
yogurth
on a menu, although this seems to be a widely-accepted spelling for what I always learned was yogur.
One sees a lot of things that are advertised as 'ligth' (having fewer calories than the regular style), and I've even seen a sign advertising a dentist that works on 'teet.'
Unfortunately, I have not had my camera with me when I've seen a lot of these things; hopefully in the future, I can snap a few examples to share with you here.
Posted by crispy at February 16, 2008 03:00 PM
Comments
The dentist that works on "teet" made me laugth out loud.
Thanks,
Gay
Posted by: Gay G-L at February 17, 2008 01:46 PM
See this entry for a good photo-example.
Posted by: Chris Coen at March 4, 2008 12:38 PM