iPod and iPad in Spanish

WARNING: International Phonetic Alphabet ahead. I try to make it easy for people who don't know IPA, which is most of you, and people who don't see the symbols. IPA makes this kind of discussion way easier.

There are only two things I wanted to find online that I couldn't: 1. Train schedules for the railroads in my town and 2. How Spanish speakers pronounce "iPad" and "iPod". I did a bunch of searches for the second thing and couldn't find anything.

Apple's iPad has the worst product name ever. It sounds like "iPod" with an annoying accent. In fact, most languages don't distinguish the vowel /æ/ in "iPad" from the vowel /ɑ/ in "iPod". Most of them merge them together into /a/, which sounds similar to /ɑ/. So I asked my Facebook friends. They said it's "like in English". This doesn't help me. The English pronunciations are /aipæd/ and /aipɑd/, and Spanish would merge them both into /aipad/. Spanish spelling suggests /ipað/ "ee-pahth" and /ipoð/ "ee-pohth".

I found a page about how Japanese speakers say iPad and iPod. They say /aipad/ for "iPad", which sounds more like "iPod" to me, and /aipod/ or /aipoud/ for "iPod", which sounds like "eye-pode". This is interesting because Japanese doesn't allow "d" at the end of a syllable. Japanese syllables only end with a vowel or "n".

So I asked two actual Spanish speakers in person. They both told me they pronounce it "like in English", /aipad/ and /aipad/. (Final /d/ may have been /ð/ because final /d/ in Spanish always becomes /ð/.) One may have been /aipɑd/, but I definitely did not hear /aipæd/ or even /aipɛd/ or /aiped/. So they basically say them the same.

The final lesson: Apple doesn't respect people who don't speak English. Gives me less reason to respect Apple.

Alphabets and culture

There's a strong connection between language and culture. Everybody knows that. That's why so many countries look down on minority languages. It used to be illegal to speak Sardinian in Italy. Some countries encourage them, like modern Spain. In the US there have been many movements to get rid of foreign languages, but Spanish still holds strong. One reason some people in Québec want to split from Canada is they speak French and the rest of Canada speaks English... except New Brunswick is bilingual English/French and Nunavut speaks Inuktitut.

There's also a strong connection between alphabets and culture. Alphabets correlate with religion a lot. Greek, Latin, and Cyrillic (Russian) alphabets are Christian alphabets. Orthodox Christians used the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets while Catholics and Protestants used the Latin alphabet. All three alphabets share a capital A, E, M, O, and T. Jews used the Hebrew alphabet and Muslims used the Arabic alphabet. Yiddish uses the Hebrew alphabet but it's related to German, not to Hebrew. I don't know enough about any other religions to know other connections.

In modern times alphabets can represent political alliances. During the Cold War the Cyrillic alphabet represented Communism and the Latin alphabet represented the free world. It's not cut and dry in practice - most of Eastern Europe still used Latin. The USSR didn't ban minority languages but they required them to use Cyrillic. The alphabet of the Orthodox Church became the alphabet of oppression.

Writing systems don't mean two languages are related. Chinese and Japanese are not related, but Japanese borrowed a lot of Chinese symbols and added two sets of syllable-signs. English, Greek, Russian, Armenian, Persian, and Hindi are related, but they all use different alphabets. English, Finnish, Turkish, Swahili, Tagalog, and Quechua are not related and they use the same alphabet.

In fact, Turkish used the Arabic alphabet for centuries. They were a Muslim country. The Arabic alphabet doesn't suit Turkish well. Then Mustafa Kemal Atatürk established the secular republic of Turkey in the early 20th century. He wanted to promote literacy and shift Turkey's cultural alliances toward Europe. So he and his linguist buddies switched to the Latin alphabet, which fits Turkish very well. Click here to compare the two alphabets.

To learn more about writing systems, visit Omniglot.

Rolling R's

Some speech sounds are harder to master than others. I've wrestled with Spanish for years and I've never been able to do "rr". Linguists call this an "alveolar trill". It's also in Italian, Russian, and a bunch of other languages. The single "r" is fine but "rr" always gives me problems. Any time I try to do one I get some other sound, more like the "ll" from Welsh. Fortunately, Spanish speakers can understand.

NOT! Do you know how you hear lisps? That's how they hear it. Either they ignore you or they make fun of you. They don't help you. It's a common speech impediment. I don't know if it's genetic or if I'm not used to it. I can make lots of other sounds easily. The French/German "r", a "uvular trill", is real easy for me. I use it when I "speak" Spanish because it sort of sounds like the Spanish "rr". I want to learn the "right" sound someday. Most instructions for learning it make no sense. I may have to accept that I have a Spanish lisp. But I don't know anyone who learned English as a second language who talks like a native. No matter how fluent they are, they sound foreign.

It's ridiculous that I can do the Dutch "g", Welsh "ll", Italian "gli", etc. but not a sound that's common in lots of languages. I don't find any German sounds hard, including their R, their umlaut vowels, or their "ch" sounds. There are other sounds I don't know how to do but they're not in languages I encounter every day.

I read somewhere that most people can do the Spanish/Italian one or the French/German one easily, but not both. I also found out there's a disorder called Ankyloglossia where the tongue is tied to the floor of the mouth. I may have this. I can barely stick my tongue out.

The "th" sounds in English are very hard to learn. (1, 2) They were the last sounds I learned. A lot of foreign speakers use "s" or "f". Some dialects use "s", "f", or "t" for "th". Thankfully, they're rare in other languages.

Linguists call the English "r" an "alveolar approximant". It's only in a few other languages. Here is a list of R sounds in different languages.

Esperanto

I'm a language nut but I only speak English. I want to learn more languages someday. I took Spanish in high school and French in college but my Spanish sucks and my French is even worse. I really want to get good at Spanish someday. I could talk to a lot of people who don't speak English. It's one of my favorite languages to listen to. And it's useful here. There ain't much use for anything other than English, Spanish, or Choctaw in Mississippi.

I'd also love to learn Esperanto. Esperanto is a constructed language designed for world use. Esperanto.net gives more information and Lernu! offers Esperanto courses. I've looked at Esperanto a bit. While it's nowhere near perfect, it's still better than English for a world language. Sometimes I forget how much privilege I have that my native language is the standard world language.

As always Wikipedia has a good article on Esperanto and other related conlangs such as Ido and Novial.

I have my Facebook in Esperanto right now. Google Chrome keeps flagging the page as either Slovak or Spanish. Makes sense because Esperanto's a mashup of Slavic languages (Slovak, Czech, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian) and Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, Italian, Romanian). Back then the rest of the world wasn't part of the world. I'm learning a few words from Facebook, but I'll forget most of them when I switch it to some other language. I should switch it to Spanish or French for fun. I've also done Welsh, Latin, and a few of the joke ones like Pirate and 1337.

Snob Appeal in Computing

I'm one of those holdouts who refuses to use "hacker" for security breakers. The right term according to the Jargon File is cracker. The real meaning of hacker refers to a kind of super-programmer. I'm not a hacker and I never will be - I don't have the personality. But I respect them. It bugs me when people talk about "hackers" breaking into things and causing damage. A hacker may crack your computer but he/she will tell you how to fix the hole. Real hackers don't cause damage. They build things instead, especially on Linux.

This brings me around to another thing: Why do people pronounce Linux "Linnux" (IPA lɪnəks) when that's not how it's spelled? Snob appeal. I pronounced it to rhyme with English "Linus" (IPA lainəks, or laənəks in my Southern accent) for a long time. Then I asked a snobby bookstore cashier about "Lye-nux" books, and he didn't understand me. Then he responded "Oh, you mean Linnux books. We have all kinds of Linnux books... I love Linnux..." Turns out Mr. Snob was wrong too: this link lets you hear OS creator Linus Torvalds himself say it. He says it "Leenooks" (IPA linʊks). Now I say either linʊks or linəks. However, most Linux users are snobs. Same goes with most hackers, including the good kind. If you pronounce something different from how it's spelled, it gives it snob appeal. The snob knows something regular people don't.

Linus Torvalds is Finnish but his name and first language are Swedish. Some people argue "Linnux" is the Anglicized version of "Leenooks", but Swedish has our short "i" vowel. It's rare in most languages, but common in Germanic languages such as English, German, and of course Swedish. If he meant "Linnux", he would have said it. But he didn't.

The same applies to Mac snobs who say "OS Ten" instead of "OS X". In this case I don't care how the Apple people say it. If they wanted people to say "OS Ten" they should have called it "OS 10". As for me I'm waiting for Mac OS Y to come out.

At least people don't say "Wine-doss" for Windows. No wonder non-snobs stick to Windows.

Uncyclopedia, the content-free alternative to Wikipedia, has an enlightening article on Linux.

(I still read "Linux" as Lye-nucks. I have to force myself to say it different.)

The Lord's Prayer in Old English