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[–] 71 points 2 years ago (4 children)

No, they pronounce it correctly.

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  • [–] 55 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    I was once an Italian kid. My parents would have beat me if I pronounced spaghetti wrong.

    So no. They don't.

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  • [+] -44 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    Ah yes, threats of abuse, famous for always having the outcome they intend

    [edit: especially when dealing with children who are still developing their ability to speak and comprehend speech]

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  • [–] 33 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    How do you mispronounce something with your hands?

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (9 children)

    I always thought the mispronunciation was more of a puhscetti than a buhsgetti

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    I've encountered both. The two I mentioned got the point across.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago* (5 children)

    We say spuhghetti around these parts.

    I feel like I'm misunderstanding the joke though.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    They're talking about when young Italian kids are first learning the word do they mispronounce it the same way.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (3 children)

    I'm just confused on the buh part. I've never heard anyone pronounce it like that.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    The pronunciations you have in your head are mispronunciations that some children & uneducated people use.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Yes, that's why OP is asking if Italian children make similar mispronunciations. Like is it an artifact of learning a word that sounds like that in general or of learning it in the context of English specifically?

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    From what I remember the last time I heard an Italian kid mispronounce spaghetti they just skipped the s so the result was paghetti.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Heh. When my daughter was small, she could say spaghetti, but also added the initial "s" to baguette, making it a "spaguette" .

    We're German, by the way, so we frequently eat both.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    No, we don't.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    I can't say this with 100% certainty, but Italians migrated to America at the end of the 19th century. And they did so from the poorer south. So I've heard that American Italian communities speak Italian like modern day grandparents. Here's an article on why American Italians pronounce cappacola gabagol.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    Surely they must do? Like kids are not going to find certain sounds like 'sp' easier depending on what country they're from but maybe the sounds they learn first with be different?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Kids do in fact have an easier time pronouncing syllables they hear about them. And from about age 3 it starts going downhill. At 9 it’s near impossible to learn to speak a new language without accent.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago*

    That's true, but also, speech-motor control develops throughout childhood, and one of the last things children develop is consonant clusters. This means words like (sp)a(gh)etti are harder for most children to say than, for example, "banana", regardless of their language. Children tend to replace difficult clusters with one of their sounds, and when there's more than one difficult cluster in a word, sometimes the other sound of one gets transposed in place of the other.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I've heard that it's until 12~14, depending on exposure.

    I know people who moved to Canada from countries with little exposure at or after the age of 9 who still speak their mother tongue at home, and yet have no accent at all when speaking English. A very linguistically different language from English, at that.

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  • [+] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 11 months ago)
    [+] -6 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    Why shall Italiens pronounce like Americans?

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  • [–] 40 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    They are asking because kids are kids no matter where you live. If we use the same word for the dish as Italians, it stands to reason that children who are still learning would have the same issue regardless of location.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Exactly! I think one of the fun things about growing up is realizing that your personal experience isn't completely unique, and that other people have shared similar experiences. I also don't think it's weird to have the idea that many of the things we enjoy and find funny (like puns and silly sounds) would cross language and cultural boundaries.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    It's the same word on paper, but pronounced different. Italians tend to speak the vowels longer, with a slightly different sound (the "a" in American sounds like an "uh", in Italian like a long "ah"). They also speak out both t's separately.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Kids being a blank canvas and universal is a theory that's been deemed untrue. The kids would have been subjected to s very different soundscape of periode talking and will have practiced different sounds long before they started using words.

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  • [+] -47 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    You know there are sources for sound and moving pictures on the internet?

    https://piped.video/ph1lXptuR7Q

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