Sunday, July 24, 2005
A big plate of pasketti
A question for my linguistic connections. It seems that every small child calls spaghetti pasketti. My sister did, Abbey does, it's a common joke about small children. What is this word so universally bungled? Is sp a late-developing phonetic combination? And the real question, do Italian children do the same thing? Or does the accent and gesturing preserve them from that fate?
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Welcome to my odditorium, a collection of curiosities made up of snippets about my life and occasional machinations on deeper subjects.
3 comments:
As a linguistic connection, I can tell you that indeed, you're right that "spaghetti" is universally bungled in English. Not always of the form "pasketti" (it can also be "sketti", "sagetti" and many others), but it's quite a difficult word -- not only is it long (three syllables) but starts with a consonant cluster ("late-developing" and "difficult").
When it comes to the form of the mistake "pasketti", it's (linguistically) interesting to see that the "s" moves to the onset of the next syllable, which is a fairly consistent pattern in speech errors (when phonemes move in an error, they usually go to the same position, either at the start of a word ("barn door" > "darn bore") or at the same position in a different syllable of the same word ("prioritize" > "tioriprize").
The sound of the "k" is formed by accommodation to the "s" ("s" and "k" are voiceless consonants, i.e. the vocal cords do not vibrate, while "g" is voiced and does not typically follow "s" in English).
Do Italian children do the same thing? My (linguistically informed) sources say "definitely". Errors of this sort are universal, and depend on the structure of words that children already know or are exposed to.
Accent doesn't play a role, except that the local speech patterns will be reflected in what children say (I don't distinguish between "pin" and "pen" in my speech, because I grew up in a part of the midwest where the vowel is the same).
Gesture, perhaps I've rambled on long enough, but briefly (ha!), researchers have shown that across languages and cultures, people gesture with approximately the same frequency. Certain cultures (Italian among them) just do so with a lot more vigor than others (and may have more conventionalized gestures). I'll write on my own blog about gestures in the near future.
I'd like to add a trite and silly comment to counteract the erudition in the earlier one.
Spaghetti is hard to say. Just be sure you always serve and refer to vermicelli or linguine instead, as both are much easier to say.
Just be sure to tell Abigail that Aunt Amanda was a "basketti" girl. Close enough to be the same.
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