People's judgments about their own speech patterns are notoriously unreliable. I noticed it on several occasions. One of the first ones was when I was learning Spanish and people would correct me when I said things like Pasa que sigo resfriado. I was supposed to say Lo que pasa es que sigo resfriado, the former was total rubbish that nobody ever said. But actually the corrector herself would occasionally use the shorter form in casual and rapid speech.
Yesterday I experienced a particularly cute example: a Polish friend was instructing a Belgian guy how to pronounce the Polish word się, and as people often will when adjusting speech for non-native speakers, she said that as /ɕɛw̃/. I started objecting that such a pronunciation never occurred in normal conversational speech and that she herself didn't pronounce /ɛw̃/ (but rather /ɛ/) in się and other words spelled with word-final ę. To which she responded Ale ja tak mówię! (But I do speak like that!), pronouncing mówię, of course, as /'muvjɛ/ :)
For some even more outlandish claims made by someone about their own phonology, check out They have ears, but they hear not on the Language Log.
4 comments:
Bueno, ten en cuenta que primero hay que enseñar la lengua correcta y después ya vendrá la coloquial... es cuestión de tiempo y de que el alumno sea consciente del registro que está utilizando. De lo contrario sería un caos en las aulas, nie?
Chrupala, c'est un plaisir de connaitre tus ondas/olas/rizos (el portugués es muy polisémico) cerebrales! y ya veo que esto no va de bromas.... molt bé! ;)
sexylia, bemvinda w moich falach mózgowych!
Karolink OK, Pero sospecho que (en el ejemplo español) la persona en cuastión realmente creía que ella nunca usaría esta construcción.
As to the Polish example, it's the nasalized pronunciation that is strongly marked as formal and even artificial. The pronunciation with non-nasal ɛ is the normal, unmarked form that is used almost always.
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