It's Pronounced AS-PER-GERS!

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Yes, I do aspirate it so it becomes almost like a single syllable, but the s is still attached more to the 'a' than to the 'per'. If you've got an understanding of language, as you appear to, you'd possibly hear the 'p' rather than the 'b' most people seem to hear when I say it though. I have friends with far broader kiwi accents than me who say it with a far more pronounced 'b' sound though; it very much seems to depend on where in the country you're from, as with many things. When I say it there's more of a 'p' than a lot of people around here. My mother says it with a 'p'.

Regardless of that sound though (which seems fairly interchangeable, though people from other countries probably wouldn't pick up on the nuances as much as a kiwi), the pronounciation here seems to be fairly general, with the 'as', soft 'g' and emphasis on the second syllable. There is still more emphasis on the first syllable than third though, almost as much as the second, if that makes sense. The first 'er' (following the p) sounds like the 'ur' in 'purr' though, whereas the last 'er' sound is more of an 'is'.

I would use phonetics but I'm afraid I don't know of the ones required, I didn't pay enough attention in any of my classes!!

Yes.

"Proper" US pronunciation is "'æspɚgɚ," but the German would be something like "'ɑzpeɾger" (ahz-pair-gair) (not completely sure on that). But I use "ass-burger" because it's more fun (and more commonly known).

I always read all of your posts, LeKiwi, in an attempt to understand why you persistently wish to promulgate your strange pronunciation.

You still can give no example of any other word where you take a word with a "p" and pronounce it as a "b".

You now say that you also will continue to mispronounce it with a soft "g", versus the hard "g" which I believe other posters have now confirmed is the way the people concerned would pronounce their own surname.

You also say you additionally mispronounce the final "er". I have no idea why you would want to change that to an "iz" sound.

You ignore both sound clips from the dictionaries, again.

You say you do not understand phonetics, but in any case, the OED gives: Asperger: Brit. /ˈasˌpəːgə/, U.S. /ˈasˌpərgər/, whereas Merriam_Webster gives the single As·per·ger's: \ˈäs-ˌpər-gərz-\ i.e. only the American form, and that with a lengthened initial "a".

Why do you go on grossly mispronouncing the word?

Wikipedia's article on New Zealand English is woefully inadequate The best reconstruction I can get using it of how you'd be pronouncing it is /.ɛs - 'pɵ:- dʒɘz/ (taking some liberties from your description). English has three stress levels, primary, secondary, and unstressed, so I'm guessing that your placing the secondary stress on the first syllable. I hadn't realized how different NZ vowels were before.

lau:

A quick perusal of Wikipedia reveals that generally even in stressed positions voiceless consonants are not aspirated in most dialects of English after a /s/. Thus, even in second syllable stressed pronunciations, the word would still bear something of a resemblance to "ass-burger". How did I manage to miss that So I still stick to my guns that "ass-burger" is just normal English leveling of the fortis-lensis contrast mid-word (for a much more extreme version, consider the fact that /t/ and /d/ aren't distinct at all in unstressed positions in many dialects).

re: final "er". First off, he's clearly using a shortened version of the full name, so the word is possessive (Are we talking about Hans here or his disorder).
Second, I think you may be confused on how he's pronouncing the final syllable's vowel. The vowel in rhotic syllables in NZ English is raised only slightly and somewhat rounded as compared to the British English version, and is transcribed /ɵ/. Further, "is" isn't pronounced /ɪz/ in NZ English as it is in other varieties, it's actually pronounced (according to Wiki) /ɘz/, which is much closer to /əz/ than it is to /ɪz/. Consequently, based on either interpretation I'm getting out of his description, it doesn't sound too different from the British version (and never even mind the fact that at least in Standard American schwa is frequently raised to a sound very similar to /ɪ/ anyway.)

As for the whole pronouncing the last syllable /dʒəz/, it's just a simple dialect issue. There are other words in which the godawful Romantic use of "g" has baffled English readers and then become incorporated into our pronunciation incorrectly I'm sure...

I wasn't sure what you meant here.

One thing that always seems slightly odd to me is when people write "Aspergers". I think there are precedents for the possessive apostrophe to "go walkabout", are there not? The obvious cases, you could say, are words like "yours" and then it comes sashaying back in to "one's".

I'll always use the possessive apostrophe in the word (unless I'm being sloppy on a forum such as this!). That's one thing that always baffled me somewhat... I would have assumed the use of possessive apostrophe was appropriate here, as it's "Mr Asperger's thing", yet many seem to leave it out. I would just assume they're being sloppy...


Lau, I suggest you speak to someone from another country and you'll have the answers you so desire. That, or search for the word 'accent', or phrase 'regional pronounciation'. Or just plain learn another language - there are no fixed rules as to why you do or do not say things the way they're said; it's just the way it happens. When you're speaking a language, as you should know (obviously you speak at least one...), you don't think about why you say things the way you do, you just say them that way. Why? Because that's the way you speak in your particular accent.

Apologies, but this is such an annoying post. Five freakin' pages - has anyone bothered asking his daughter or an Austrian? It's like the debate on pronouncing Linux (just ask Linus Toorman, damnit!)

It's an Austrian surname. Not everyone can roll their r's and do the elegant pronounciation of the e's. So, in lieu of that, make sure that you:

- put the accent on the first syllabus, not the second
- don't say j as in juice, but g as in gold for the "gers"

If you cover those, you're ok in my books. If you want to be fancy, then:

- pronounce the as as "Ahs", like in blah-blah, just with a much shorter shorter "a" (NO NOT ARSE, there is no R in AHS)
- pronounce the p with the P as a P, not a B
- pronounce the er with the same accent as in "errant"
- pronounce the ger as in "girdle"
- Both "e"'s has an elegant "swing" to them, understated yet distinctly European...
- Both "r"'s should be rolled in the back of your throat (or, if you can't, could also be pronounced like the phlegmlike ch in "achtung"...)

Then, my son, you will be a man...

I think this is appropriate here:

Why does this happen? Because when a word is adopted into another language, you adapt the way in which you say it, as oftentimes the adopted language - in this case English - lacks the inflections, letters, or sounds required to pronounce it properly. It wouldn't be natural for an english speaker to pronounce Asperger the correct Austrian/German way in the context of an english sentence as the mouth etc is required to move in a different and unnatural way, so it becomes adapted so as to fit the natural speech patterns of the English language. If it was to be used in the context of German, then it would be said properly, even by an English-speaker who says it the anglicised way normally. When you're speaking another language you use different parts of the tongue, mouth, lips, teeth, and throat to make the different sounds, so the correct pronounciation would come naturally in context.

Correct, but in this case the Hard G of English is closer. And entirely possible to speak using all of the English dialects. Naturally one wouldnt just jump from the hard G of the original pronunciation to the soft G.

For instance, the root word for Germany, Germani, comes from latin anyway, with the soft G. The soft G has more in common with French and the other romance languages. Like the word germane: \(ˌ)jər-ˈmān\ Etymology: Middle English germain, literally, having the same parents, from Anglo-French Date: 14th century

So in this case, I dont think you can fairly claim that its being anglicised. Remember that the term anglicised refers to Anglo-Saxon:



as per wikipedia, who i think we are safe to trust in this matter. Softening a G isnt anglicising it.


There are dialectisms of course. We Canadians have vowel lifting which causes Americans to hear us say words like 'about' as 'aboot'. Its more than an effect on our part. their own habitual talking renders them effectively deaf to the pronunciation and they substitute ou for oo, as that is their closest sound. That aspect of dialect is borrowed from the Irish and Scottish and is more common in the east coast and central Canada.

They think we western Canadians sound like Americans.

Conversely, we hear Americans say words like 'roof' as 'ruff'. They say their "oo"'s lower than us.

But I think you would have a hard time arguing that with the sound of 'G'. After all, you dont call a young woman a "jirl" or Fuzzy a "joofball".

Proper names dont get translated. I'd like to close with an example of another medical condition named for a person with a Germanic last name. I speak of Lou Gehrig's disease. It was named for Ludwig Heinrich Gehrig, an American of Germanic descent, and its not pronounced with a labialized g either. Do kiwis say lou jehrigs disease? I doubt it.

Since Kiwi ears are trained to hear the difference, and your locutions include both variants of the G sound, it comes down to a matter of social custom, indifference and lack of awareness. Since only the first applies to you, I would hope that you (and anyone reading this) would correct themselves.

It doesn't though; it's the way it would naturally come out when I and any other kiwi speaks English. There's no logical reason for the soft g, other than it's how it's said here because it's how it comes out. I'd never heard it said with the hard g (except when the sentence it featured in was spoken in German) until I heard the word said by an American.

It could be something to do with our inclusion of a lot of Maori words and having a bilingual country (though few are fully fluent in te reo Maori) that we say things strangely at times; it isn't uncommon for me to include in a sentence a Maori name or place or phrase, and to say them with the proper Maori pronounciation, in the midst of an english sentence with standard kiwi english pronounciation. I think this can lead to our english and our words somehow being a little odd at times, though there's not much use of the letter 'g' or any soft gs in Maori... it's usually used in conjunction with an 'n' to make 'ng'. I also speak or are learning a few other languages and live in another country, which has led to a pretty scrambled accent at times, but again, the way I've described myself as pronouncing the word is common to everyone I know in the autistic community here, so I don't really know how much significance that all does play. My point is more that it could have something to do with it.

Again, I'd never heard it said with a hard 'g' until I heard an American say it.

I guess the only real way to explain it is to ask you to explain why you say words the way you say them - it isn't because it's correct or accurate; it's because that's just how it works in your accent. And that's what makes us so diverse and our regions and countries so unique and so great.

You still give no example of another word that you mangle in any similar fashion, LeKiwi. You even go so far as to say that you will use correct pronunciation of Maori within an English sentence. So why will you not consider using Hans Asperger's surname with at least some attempt at accuracy, rather than belittling it. "Asperger's" is not "a word" - it is the possessive, applied to a surname.

In the similar case of Linux, I try to pronounce it fairly close to the way Linus Torvalds pronounces the word he coined, with maybe a leaning toward the way it is spelt, as I did not know the correct (i.e. his) pronunciation when I first came across it. The [http://www.paul.sladen.org/pronunciation/]very old sound clip for this is available in many places[/url]. In this case, he has announced his acceptance that many people pronounce it differently.

Ah coooool you found the Linux clip!

Criticizing his use of the "soft" "g" is one thing, but this is silly. The possessive form can always be used in English as an independent noun where the object is understood (a grammatical structure I believe shared by Japanese, if nothing else).

Wikipedia on possessive pronouns: "The clitic -'s also works as a possessive pronoun such as John's." and "Like all other pronouns, it substitutes a noun phrase and can prevent its repetition." Thus, Asperger's = Asperger's Syndrome. This isn't even a dialect thing.

Now, you all (except, shockingly enough, the people with some linguistics experience) are confused about how the pronunciation for a speaker is determined. The word is clearly common enough in LeKiwi's dialect that it has a dialect form. The word is no longer a German word, it is a German loanword into NZ English that has distinct semantic properties from the original word. There are, I can assure you, many cases of words we use in English in which the pronunciation has been influenced by the spelling to end up needlessly different from the original. Telling him he's saying it "wrong" is as silly as me telling you to pronounce your Latin loanword's vowels correctly.

Considering Asperger became well known within the last century, and the syndrome has only become well known in recent years, I don't think it has the same grammatical evolution as ancient Latin words, so that's not really a good comparison. A more relevant comparison would be like the word "Internet". Being a fairly recent invention, it would be really weird if the word had evolved to many different languages, and was pronounced differently in 2 English-speaking countries. Indeed, internet is pronounced pretty much the same world-wide, even in non-English-speaking countries. That's why many people would find it hard to believe that "Asperger" has evolved different pronunciations by region, instead of it just being pronounced incorrectly.

No. You quote me out of context. I was referring to the attempt at using the fact that it was now "a word" as justification for arbitrarily changing its pronunciation. This is why I placed the two words "a" and "word" in quotation marks. The transition from "Asperger's Syndrome" to "Asperger's" has nothing to do with pronunciation.


I would be interested to hear from other New Zealanders, whether they concur with this assumption.
As to the spelling - that comes back to my repeated request - for another example of a word spelt with a "p" but pronounced as a "b".


(What a strange statement, at the end - I was unaware that there were any recordings from ancient Rome.)
Anyway, no. I did not originate the idea that she pronounced it wrong. She said so, when she first joined this thread.
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp1271183.html#1271183


I firmly believe there is, in this case, a clear difference between an accented pronunciation and a mispronunciation. The vowel sounds can in part be ascribed to accent, but there is only, so far as I have heard, one reason for the "p"/"b" consonant change: the childlike "humour" of distorting it into a word pair (which pair I steadfastly refuse to type, as I consider it demeaning). In the above, that "joke" is played down by a further, P.C. distortion, leaving only minor connection between the spelling and the pronunciation.

"correct" is a normative term based on linguistic unrealities. There is no "right" pronunciation of a word: there are only the standards of one dialect imposed on another.

Second, while I can certainly see your point, Latin words borrowed moderately recently (although, clearly, not as recently as Asperger) have undergone similar butchering of the Latin vowel system based on erroneous interpretation of the orthography as having the same standards as English's. My point is that, irrespective of the length of time a word has been used by a population, once the word has become a word of a dialect it is subject to the lexicon of that dialect.