Indiaspeak

Question

Anymore, if you call customer support for help with computer problems, you have a good chance of being put through to a helper in India. This gives you an opportunity to sample the oddities of Indian English.
In my recent experience, two Indian-English words that defied comprehension were "connet", pronounced ('kAn@t) ("KAHnuht"), and "suppert", pronounced ('SVp@rt)
("SUPPert").
When the man asked me "Did you connet the disk?", I was completely baffled, and getting him to spell it for me was no help at first. He replied "c-o-n-n-e-t". But after a minute or so, he said, "I'm sorry, Bob, I spelled it wrong: It's "c-o-n-n-e-c-t".
"Suppert" was almost as bad. He was saying rather rapidly "Doubleya doubleya doubleya dot Gateway dot SUPPert dot com". In this case, when I asked him to spell that funny word after "Gateway dot", his first spelling was correct: "s-u-p-p-o-r-t".
In Calcutta during World War II, I heard ('Av@l@b@l) ("AHvuhluhbuhl") for "available". A friend of mine foolishly tried to get the man to pronounce it right, but the man was confident his pronunciation was the correct one.

Usenet · Accepted Answer

[nq:1]Anymore, if you call customer support for help with computer problems, you have a good chance of being put through ... tried to get the man to pronounce it right, but the man was confident his pronunciation was the correct one.[/nq]
Probably no worse than Geordie English.
Tombola Hindustani ?

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]Anymore, if you call customer support for help with computer problems, you have a good chance of being put through ... tried to get the man to pronounce it right, but the man was confident his pronunciation was the correct one.[/nq]
First Indian Gentleman: "It is spelled W-O-M-B!"
Second Indian Gentleman: "No, no, no, it is spelled W-O-O-M!"

Helpful Englishman: "I think you will find he is correct, it is spelled W-O-M-B".
Second Indian Gentleman: "Excuse me Sir, but I seriously doubt whether you have seen a water buffalo let alone heard it **** underwater".
Richard Bollard
Canberra, Australia

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]Anymore, if you call customer support for help with computer problems, you have a good chance of being put through to a helper in India. This gives you an opportunity to sample the oddities of Indian English.[/nq]
The last Indian supporter I talked to had an excellent American accent. I complimented him on it. He was quite pleased.
[nq:1]In my recent experience, two Indian-English words that defied comprehension were "connet", pronounced ('kAn@t) ("KAHnuht"), and "suppert", pronounced ('SVp@rt) ("SUPPert"). ... tried to get the man to pronounce it right, but the man was confident his pronunciation was the correct one.[/nq]
Sometime back in prehistory when I was a grad student, I asked one of the Indian grad students why the Indian students used nearly identical pronunciations of English words. He told me that they all learned their pronunciations from special pronunciation dictionaries; all Indian English-teachers used the same dictionaries. Maybe Rey has a copy of one these monstrosities written by someone who never heard English spoken by a native speaker.

The ways of the world are Fawlty Towers scripts.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]In my recent experience, two Indian-English words that defied comprehension were "connet", pronounced ('kAn@t) ("KAHnuht"), and "suppert", pronounced ('SVp@rt) ("SUPPert"). ... tried to get the man to pronounce it right, but the man was confident his pronunciation was the correct one.[/nq]
This is a common problem: English is so far from being a genuinely foreign language in India and Pakistan that it's pretty well hopeless to look for any suppression of stress-patterns influenced by Indian languages. The most sophisticated speakers get it right (in our terms), but the rest don't. Sometimes on TV you'll see a programme in which Indian speakers with a perfect command of English vocabulary and structure have to be given subtitles before you can understand them at all.
(I may have mentioned before that I'm haunted by an incident in a documentary in which a British patient was being interviewed by an Indian psychiatrist, and was quite unable to understand the repeated question "What's your address?" I'd have thought that the one category of patient which had imperatively to be seen by doctors of the same national background was the psychiatric.)
Mike.

Usenet · Answer

Mike Lyle wibbled
[nq:1](I may have mentioned before that I'm haunted by an incident in a documentary in which a British patient was ... one category of patient which had imperatively to be seen by doctors of the same national background was the psychiatric.)[/nq]
It would help with most categories of patient IME - being mystified by a Chinese midwife talking about Lycra* at 3am did nothing for my sleep the night before delivery. Similarly, the doctor a few nights later who heard "nightdress" and wrote "pyjama" (sic) managed to thoroughly confuse the midwife who read the notes an hour later, as she asked if I'd changed my clothes and I had no idea what she was talking about (it would have been quite important, in the circumstances, if I had). We eventually guessed that the doctor had translated 'nightdress' into Russian, then translated back incorrectly.
* Liquor. Still not the word most people would recognise ('waters' being far more common) but much more understandable if pronounced recognisably.
Jac

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]Mike Lyle wibbled[/nq]
[nq:2](I may have mentioned before that I'm haunted by an ... by doctors of the same national background was the psychiatric.)[/nq]
[nq:1]It would help with most categories of patient IME - being mystified by a Chinese midwife talking about Lycra* at ... Still not the word most people would recognise ('waters' being far more common) but much more understandable if pronounced recognisably.[/nq]
Maybe the midwife was a frequenter of pie and mash shops?
John Dean
Oxford
De-frag to reply

Usenet · Answer

Quoth Bob Cunningham:
[nq:1]"Suppert" was almost as bad. He was saying rather rapidly "Doubleya doubleya doubleya dot Gateway dot SUPPert dot com". In this case, when I asked him to spell that funny word after "Gateway dot", his first spelling was correct: "s-u-p-p-o-r-t".[/nq]
Didn't you know? There is no such thing as a free suppert.

Oliver Cromm
Fatal exception in module gravitation.dll. Instable state of cosmos. The universe will be restarted now. Any unsaved data will be lost. (after an idea from "Boarder Lord" at www.heise.de)

Indiaspeak

Top answer

Get the Weekly English Kit 📬