AMERICAN LITERATURE COURSE IN LAVAPIÉS

El Curso de Literatura Norteamericana brinda la oportunidad de practicar el inglés a través de la literatura. (Nivel intermedio/avanzado).
Dará comienzo el 7 de octubre. La clase es los martes de 18.00 a 20.00hs.
Si el horario te viene mal, junta a otros tres amigos y se abrirá otro grupo (mínimo cuatro participantes) en otro horario.
Más información en la web de Face To Face.

PRONUNCIATION

We recently got an email from an enthusiastic 24 year-old student. He wanted to know whether it was possible for him to learn and get to master the English language like a native speaker. Specially regarding oral skills. He wanted a direct and honest answer.
Given his interest and enthusiasm he will, with the help of a good teacher, no doubt learn English well enough to read, work, write letters, travel and enjoy films in original version. But the road that leads from there to fooling someone into believing you were born in Sussex is long and winding.
English pronunciation is a sticky matter. One of the best paid jobs I ever had was helping a top executive to read out a speech for a video that would be viewed by the directors of the multinational company he worked for. He was obsessed with sounding like a true Englishman. (We did not discuss whether this referred to the Queen's English or he had a specific accent in mind). After working on his pronunciation and intonation for one long week, I'm afraid all we achieved was to make him sound like a foreigner who spoke perfectly understandable English. All through the week he kept asking every English speaking person who walked into the studio: "Do you think I sound like an Englishman?" And when the polite answer was "yes" (Oh, the importance of subtlety in English manners!)he'd embarrass the person further by asking "Where would you say I was from?". This led to hums and haws and well... until one person actually asked him: "Does it matter?" and politely refrained from adding "who cares?"
I must admit that hearing Meedows instead of Meadows in Spanish newsreels can be highly irritating but then again, English pronunciation is a pain.
Here go a few examples that would dampen any future student's enthusiasm:
We must polish the Polish furniture.
The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
I did not object to the object.
They were too close to the door to close it.
When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes

English

England is probably one of the only countries in which both Germanic and Latinate languages combined, fusing together. When the Normans conquered the Anglo-Saxons, both populations co-existed, the aristocrats speaking French and the peasants Anglo-Saxon until both languages blended.
Broadly speaking, the common English words are Germanic. "Function words", prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, etc. are mostly Anglo-Saxon. Things and physical actions are also mainly Anglo-Saxon. So are most swear words or four-letter words. But professional vocabulary was brought to Britain in the Renaissance by the French, strengthening the notion that Latin-originated words are an indicator of education and endowing Latinate words with a sort of "higher status".
I remember a Spanish student telling me about her experience in the US - aside from being a fast learner, she was a big hit in her class because whenever she had to say a difficult word she did not know in English she resorted to a direct translation of the word in Spanish, the result being pretty close to the "Latinate" version of the real thing. The use of these words impressed her classmates, who did not use them in every-day language.
It is often frustrating for EFL language learners to realize that the perfectly correct English they learned in the classroom barely resembles what they hear in the streets of London or New York.
The use of Latinate words in English can jar the ear. When they are densely used, they give the impression of being an attempt to sound or seem upper class or cultivated. Whilst Germanic words are often considered to connote sincerity and frankness. This doesn't mean one thing is better than the other. It means we need both.

An extract of George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" illustrates the difference between Latinate and Germanic words. The Latinate words are in bold type.

Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. . .Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. . . . The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.


What Orwell would have thought of the great number of Spanish words currently making their way into the every-day English language, we will never know.