Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 January 16

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January 16

Swapping V and W

What is the term that mean "swapping two sounds when speaking"? I've heard the term used for the Asian practice of swapping R and L. I just finished listening to a BMW presentation on wearable technology in which he said things like "This vearable chip communicates vith the car using a wariable code." It didn't take long to hear he was clearly swapping V and W, which made me start Googling the term that describes the practice, but I can't find it. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 21:54, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

I think it's rare with speakers who regularly and consistently would actually swap two sounds, so that they systematically would be used incorrectly. What I guess is fairly common is a tendency to over-analyze a difference between one's native language and the target language (in this case English), leading to common hypercorrections, such as Italians adding initial h- to words such as eggs and apples, or Northern European people pronouncing video as wideo. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 22:10, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Or, I still think that actual swapping sounds improbable, since that would mean that a foreign language learner would have learnt the difference between the two sounds, but would still systematically use them incorrectly. What would be more probable is that the speaker might regularly use a "middle ground" phoneme, such as /ʋ/, which a native speaker might interpret as systematic swapping. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 22:34, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Some lower-class urban Dickens characters, such as Sam Weller, were written as swapping V and W, while in the late 1990s or early 2000s there was a UK teacher of South Asian origin whose pronunciation of "vertical" as "wortical" became controversial. See discussion by a linguist here... -- AnonMoos (talk) 03:34, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Sounds a bit like a German accent – not surprising for BMW. Using [ʋ] for w (in onset) is pretty common in German. This sound isn't used in English, so native English speakers may, depending on random fluctuations, interpret it as either v or w. German only really makes a two-fold distinction between f, v and w (or is anybody aware of a minimal triplet?). To emphasise the difference between f and v, the v may overshoot past [v] and turn into a [ʋ] too, a case of hypercorrection. PiusImpavidus (talk) 09:57, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Also, an initial V in a native German word is pronounced in German like /f/; the component Venn in Hohes Venn is pronounced the same as Fenn. This makes the existence of a minimal triplet less likely.  --Lambiam 10:36, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Here, for what its worth, is an old ref-desk thread on the topic. Deor (talk) 21:29, 17 January 2024 (UTC)