# Dear Hank Green, here's the science of "Bruschetta"

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** languagejones
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8Yr1jU-0EE

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8Yr1jU-0EE) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

I've always wondered where the line is, you know, of saying like tortilla versus just tortilla. And especially as opposed to tortilla, it feels racist. — Tortilla is fascinating because that's a regional accent that we make fun of generally. It's like they don't know anything, but we're still we're also saying tortilla wrong. — Hi Hank, I'm Dr. Taylor Jones, a linguist with my PhD in social linguistics and training game theoretic pragmatics. It's a thing and it's just as cool as it sounds. So, why does it feel so cringe to say brusqueta with a perfect Italian accent? — Bruseta as opposed to bruschetta. — Is it even as perfect as you imagine? For those of you who haven't seen it, Hank Green and Josh Sharer recently debated the sweet spot of pronunciation. That awkward line between sounding uncultured and sounding like a performative snob. Hank, who is not a linguist, — welcome to language, not an area of expertise of mine, — did an admiral job of answering the question, how Englishly or non-Englishly are we supposed to pronounce non-English words in English? Yo, dog, I heard you like English in your questions. They must have been hungry because they discussed bruscetta, tamales, fu, and croissants. — Croissant croissant. — Croissant croissant. and not repro or dot or whatever. I want to start by praising Hank for his careful thinking through the issues. That's you, Hank. For someone who's not a linguist, you sure talk like a linguist. You sure you didn't take Ling one somewhere? If you'd like to, you can definitely join my digital intro to linguistics when I launch sometime this year. Anyway, I want to give some depth to what Hank and Josh were working their way around and some of the ways linguists talk about this stuff that might help in reasoning through how English or not we should pronounce things. We're going to talk about nivization, social evaluation and status signaling, linguistic hyperorrection, and the things that affect our accuracy and perception of accuracy, as well as some things Hank and Josh didn't discuss, like Bourja's linguistic marketplace. No, not a used textbook black market. and the socio linguistic concept of persona construction. As a bonus, we'll discuss semantic shifts. Should you pronounce panini like it's Italian when you're using the word to refer to a grilled sandwich, which is not what it means in Italian? What about words we imagine are foreign, like nom diplume, which is imagined French. Leave me a comment if you know what the French word for a nom diplom, a pen name, is. By the end of this video, you'll understand what factors affect the decision to say bruschetta or brusketa. Linguists are supposed to be empirical and descriptive and non-judgmental, but we're also people. And some of you already know that I love shakutri, but shakuerie makes me wse. But the scientist asks, "How does the listener just know that shakutri is an artfully arranged French selection of cured meats served on a handmade wooden serving board with a bojulet and shakuderie is just lunchables on a 2x4 with grape drink? " So, that's what we're going to answer today. Not only will you know what considerations go into how much or how little you nativeize foreign words, but also what that means and how we decide based on shifting contexts how to go about doing so. I'm Dr. Taylor Jones and this is language jean. Uh this is language Jones. Let's do this. One reason the bruseta debate is so heated isn't just about phonetics, but instead about the fear of looking like a pretender. There's a huge difference between performing a single word and actually having the linguistic competence to back it up in a real conversation. If you want to move past just memorizing loan words and actually learn the mechanics of the language, I recommend Lingod. It's a live language school, not an app, where you work with certified native level teachers who can actually correct your fossilized pronunciation in real time. They have courses in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and German. I use their small group classes because the curriculum is expertly designed to get you speaking from day one instead of guessing how a native speaker would say it. You're getting immediate feedback in a low stress 24/7 environment that fits your schedule. In fact, I'm such a big fan of Lingod that full disclosure, I negotiated credits for LingoD classes as part of my compensation for sponsored content. I just like them that much. We're currently in their Easter sale. For my viewers in the US and UK, if you sign up for the Sprint or Super Sprint by April 7th, you can earn 100% cash back if you attend all your classes. It's the ultimate accountability hack. Oh, and if you use my code Taylor26, you'll get a 20 discount as well. Now, once you actually know how to pronounce the shh or sounds in Italian, the question remains, do you actually use them at an olive garden? So, let's get back to answering that question. Let's start from the absolute ground floor and build up our analysis. This might sound stupid to say out loud, but different languages are different. And there are two main elements and a bonus third that affect the brusceta dilemma. A great name for a band or the greatest name for a band. First is that languages are fundamentally ways of rearranging meaningful units which are mostly this is actually really contentious. So let me just say that they can be thought of as sounds as physiological gestures

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8Yr1jU-0EE&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

related to sounds or as the abstract idea of a sound gesture combination. As a shorthand, we'll say they're made up mostly of sounds in this case. Every spoken language has an inventory of sounds. None of them that we know of use all the sounds. So already you've got a vin diagram of some similar sounds, some different sounds. The ones that aren't shared with our language might feel unusual or hard to pronounce for us. But then you have what's called phonotactics on top of that, which is really just how languages combine those sounds. So, English has B and G and D and E and but never ever puts them together in the order, which is a real word in another language. Leave me a comment with which one of you know. Hint, it's not Klingan. This is the background, but it feels important to lay it out explicitly because now you have a decision to make when I see or think about do I use the sound patterns of English or of Italian. And of course, we have to set aside which Italian for all you Gabul Jabronis. Killing it with the band names today. Hank and Josh talked about the morphos syntax, how you conjugate or decline words, but didn't address what I think is really most noticeable to people, intonation. If I say all the same sound segments as Italian, but I do it with the intonation patterns of American English, it feels somehow less put on to people. Which sounds most correct to you? Which sounds more authentic and down to earth? Bruseta. Bruseta. So, the first part is really just understanding the question. How much do we nivize the word? force it to conform to the phonotactics of our language? To get an answer, you have to start thinking about social linguistics and how other people think. One of the key insights from both pragmatics and social linguistics is that we do things with words beyond just ordering food. Say what you do, it's the — It's the way that you do it. — But what are we doing? Well, within thirdwave social linguistics, and no, it's not called that because it's primarily done at third-wave cafes. That's just a coincidence. The focus is on the individual and how we manipulate our language to present ourselves how we think might be best received by our listener. We draw on our knowledge of what Penny Eckert and others refer to as the indexical field. Simply put, our choice between two equally linguistically valid variants within the structures of the language, say between working and working, will be conditioned by our social understanding of what those might evoke for us and for our listener. Each has positives and negatives. Working might be seen as ostensibly neutral, educated, correct, but also because it's educated and correct, prissy, inauthentic, and self argrandising compared to working, which can be seen as humble, workingass. See what I did there? Unpretentious, but also possibly ignorant, disrespectful, and backwards. Now, do that for literally every sound in every word. It's one of the many reasons why there's a difference between smoking and smoking. Okay. — The original questioner made an initial assumption that's correct and important to make explicit. It's gradient. And the more different the language and the longer the words, the more decisions you have to make. One way to think of this is in terms of Levvenstein distance. Basically, a numerical score of how different one version is from another. So depending on how you measure, the extremes of my Bruseta example have a Levenstein distance of nine. the R Ru or R. The choice of vowel between English schwa uh and Italian u notice that's a single vowel unlike the closest English vowel uh the center of gravity of the siblance of the s whether or not the c is aspirated c or c. The choice between a flapped coronal ra or an unaspirated t and the choice between an English schwa uh and an Italian ah adds up to seven and add syllable length and intonation patterns and you've got a distance of nine. If you want to know more about the details of how those sounds work and how it fits into the bigger patterns of language, I'm launching a digital introduction to linguistics later this year that covers all the major subfields and everything that you would learn in Linguan, but with less homework and delivered hopefully a lot more entertainingly. If you want to know more, get on the wait list and learn more about what's happening with the course as I'm building it out. You can sign up at www. languagejones. com/bloopprint. Returning to those different sounds, in theory, one could make any combination of those elements, leaving you not just with a gradient, but with a gradient that gives you two to the nine choices for 512 different ways of pronouncing it. Somebody who remembers combinotaurics better than I do can fact check that math in the comments. Most of them, however, are some combination of weird or unpronouncable. You still have a massive decision space here, though. Not to mention, there are stigmatized nivizations and neutral nivizations. In fact, there are some nativeizations that are so nativeized, we didn't even recognize them as foreign words anymore, like boss, buckaroo, or toodles. But Josh brought up an interesting shivalith, the choice between habanero, and habanero. — I'll hear a lot of people say like habanero. — The name describes something from Havana, which isn't pronounced in the source language with a ny, but the most common nativeization in English does have that sound. It's then thought of as

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8Yr1jU-0EE&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 14:00)

more educated, correct, worldly to use a nativeization that does not introduce what's called a hyperforeignism. Spanish has nya. So we say a word that doesn't have that nyan Spanish within English to make it more Spanishy spishy to English speakers. Some of these like habanero are stigmatized as uneducated. Some like Beijing instead of Beijing are considered standard. And that's before you get into borrowings where the word has changed meaning like panini which has taken on the meaning in English of a grilled sandwich or words that are just purely imagined like nom diplom for pen name. Leave that comment if you know what the word for nom plume is in French and words like relooking or smoking in French. You wear smoking when you've had an academic relooking. So, all of this is to say we're juggling an exhausting amount of information when we decide how to say taco. And that's before we get to the really interesting stuff. You've got your sound choices. You've got your knowledge of the other language, which may be greater or lesser. Can you even produce unaspirated stops in a word like taco? You've got your knowledge of the indexical field for each of the variants or combinations of variants or juggling. And then you have the linguistic marketplace. This is French theorist Pierre Bordier's idea of a conceptual framework where language is treated as a form of cultural capital exchanged for symbolic or material profit. You're now entering a game theoretic situation where you have to think through what your specific interlocutor, your listener, will think of each of your choices and you're trying to optimize for the relationship you want. That may be a closer relationship with your listener. Or maybe like me, you have a dry sense of humor and you're willing to burn a little bit of social capital for a joke if you don't feel like calibrating to the listener. Like the time that I asked somebody bragging about their station where they were going to go stay. And if you think that's complicated, sometimes we're calibrating to a third party or sending some subtle signals to see who picks them up. After the first syntax class in grad school, I said, "I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue. " curious to see who would recognize it. — Looks like I picked the wrong weight to quit sniffing blue. One of my colleagues, now a tenure professor, didn't get the reference and to this day thinks that I have a substance abuse problem. PhDs are not all that smart. But the point is that you can be calibrating to your listener or to a different overhearer or even to your personal internalized idealized hearer, which a lot of the language nerds who ask this kind of question are actually doing. What is correct though? Unfortunately, there's no one correct for all times and all situations. So, you end up doing what Eert and others call persona construction. That is, you have to decide, who do I want to be? my listener to perceive me as? And we're constantly negotiating this challenge from moment to moment, listener to listener, keeping track of what we've said and how we've said it over the course of a conversation. Now, we haven't even gotten into the literature on bilingualism and code switching, which in linguistics refers to using entirely different languages in the same conversation, often in the same sentence. So, how Englishly or non-Englishly are we supposed to pronounce non-English words in English? Well, it depends on a few factors. Are you good at the other language? If you're a fluent bilingual talking to a fluent bilingual, you might just code switch and pronounce the non-English words from one specific language completely non-Englishly. But if you're not a fluent bilingual or if your listener isn't, then you have a decision to make. And that decision is predicated on your ability to even pronounce the word differently, your knowledge of how the different pronunciations will be perceived, your knowledge of how well your speaker will receive that pronunciation. Insert story about trying to speak French to the French people in France here. Bagget. And your choice of how you want to be perceived and how much you even care. Unfortunately, the real answer is that there's not one correct way to pronounce a word borrowed from another language. Instead, the question gives us insight into all the different factors that come into play in thinking about how we think about how we speak and how hearers and overhearers listen. If you like what I'm doing with the channel, you can support it on YouTube with super thanks or over on Patreon at patreon. com/languagejones. Please leave a comment. They're great for the algorithm and subscribe if you haven't already. Until next time, happy learning.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/40661*