el nino and la nina

[peter123]

Hi there


How do you pronounce 'el nino' and 'la nina' in English?

thanks
pete

[BobK]

We don't go out of our way to reproduce the Spanish sounds, but we use English phonemes to reproduce the Spanish sounds fairly accurately: /el ni:njəɷ/ and /la: ni:nja:/. Some speakers, usually if they've studied Spanish, shorten the /a:/ . This is the best we do. The worst is represented by a TV announcer I heard yesterday who said [lǝ ni:nǝ] - I'm still not sure which he meant.

(This applies to British English. In the US, maybe because much of the South was originally* Spanish-speaking, the similarity to Spanish - in my experience - is closer. I'll leave it to someone else to say exactly how. [Maybe, because of the "melting pot" effect, they're just better linguists there. It's not very British to be good at languages - or if you are, it's not fashionable to make a parade of it by making foreign sounds!])

b
*That's a relative term, of course; I'm referring to the earliest European and Asian and African settlers.

[vertigomonkey]

hope this could be useful…

"nino" and "nina" are written like this: "niño" and "niña"

in english we would pronounce the "ñ" letter as a "gn", like in lasagna

so i guess you could think of it in english like 'nigno', if it helps...

[rewboss]

Originally Posted by vertigomonkey

hope this could be useful…

"nino" and "nina" are written like this: "niño" and "niña"

in english we would pronounce the "ñ" letter as a "gn", like in lasagna

so i guess you could think of it in english like 'nigno', if it helps...

Actually, it wouldn't: it would be a help if we spoke French or Italian. :)

"ñ" is pronounced like "ny" -- "neenyo" and "neenya".

[seba_870701]

Is it something like Polish 'ń' ? We tend to pronounce it somewhat like /nj/... If anybody knows the answer, please share with me.

[BobK]

(Well nearly - I know almost nothing about Polish, but the transcription /nj/ is pretty close).

b