Several years ago, former columnist and radio commentator Larry Henares repopularized a phrase to describe a good number of his countrymen (not all, fortunately!) as “little brown Americans” and for good reason. Our topic here is little brown
“Americanisms.”
We, like the Swiss, have three “national” languages; ours are Filipino, English and Spanish. Little brown “North American” that we are, we insist on pronouncing our own vowel sounds; unlike those in English they are simply a, e, i, o, and u—all short vowel sounds.
North Americans of the Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic varieties go beyond that—what with aah, aye, eeh, oh, ooh! Their tongues are similarly “Anglo-Americanistically tied up,” you might say.
But where else in the world do you find people who exchange the softness and flexibility of their own tongues for the semi-paralyzed pronunciation so characteristic of the British and North Americans, simply out of habit?! We so unctuously ape the American twang too!
In the local context. The “e” and “u” sounds are pronounced separately, even when they come one after the other, as in “Europa” which, without all the twangy apery, is pronounced as “E-u-ropa” and not as “Your oh’pah”! The South Americans say “uhrogúáy,” and NOT “YOUR-uh-gwãy,” or whatever, as we
browns do.
Lately I heard a British tennis commentator say “Reel” Madrid for the name of Real Madrid. That’s the cue for our pseudo-Anglicans to
follow suit, again in abandonment of their own ability to properly pronounce simple vowel sounds like a, e, i, o and u. Real, Europa, Uruguáy are Latin names, hence deserve to be accordingly pronounced. To do them an injustice would be like pronouncing the English name Jones “Hones” (as in “cohónes”!)
Merde, as the French would say.
—BOBBY G. KRAUT,
bobbykraut922@yahoo.com