December – May, 2013
You may wonder, as you read some of these strange names, if we have trouble pronouncing them. We don’t when we’re talking to each other as we’ll happily mangle them. The trouble comes in talking to the Kiwis.
It all starts when someone asks us where we’ve been, what we’ve seen. We’ll tell them, and they’ll have no idea where we’re talking about. We’ll describe the place and location, saying the name again. Sudden recognition will then set in: “Oh, you mean xyz!” Yes, that’s what we said! XYZ! We’ll then get a lesson on how to pronounce xyz properly, repeating it until it’s mostly understandable to a native Kiwi (saying it as if we were native Kiwis is usually beyond our ability).
It gets complicated in that some of the sounds are unique, like ng together has a soft g, as in “singer,” and wh is pronounced like f (if you’re using the more correct Maori pronunciation, otherwise, the Kiwis might just tell you wh it’s just wh). Thus Whakatane is pronounced faka-tawn-e, where an American might think it’s waka-tane. On top of all that, Kiwis tend to emphasize the first syllable. Opua isn’t pronounced Oh-poo-a, it’s Oh-poo-a.
Over the six months we were in New Zealand, we got a lot better. Saying w like an f is second nature, but I still can’t do that ng sound quite right. Of course then we went to Fiji where they have their own really bizarre pronunciations, but that’s a subject for another blog post. –Cyndi
Here’s a pervious post about some of our pronunciation troubles.
