The Turk Who Works for Turkish State Monopolice

     The Turk Who Works for Turkish State Monopolice



Hi - I've been following the prosody/pronunciation thread with 
great interest. I began teaching ESL avoiding pronunciation like 
the plague.  With good instruction from graduate school 
professors, I began to get hooked. But it was a conference on 
pronunciation with Joan Morley and Judy Gilbert that really woke 
me up to the importance of prosody. Last week I had a student give 
me the finest example yet of just how important suprasegmentals 
are.
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   When asked to tell a little something about his background, a 
new Turkish student replied, "I work for the Turkish State 
Monopolice in the division of secrets." WOW! I thought - and in my 
class! Thinking I'd missed something, I asked him to repeat. The 
same answer. Then I had an idea. I wrote on a piece of paper the 
word 'monopolies'. Could this be your word monopolice? Oh yes he
said. Then I went on to the word secrets. Hmm. Could this be 
cigarettes?  Sure he said again, secrets. Well, there it is. A 
career shift from monopolice in the division of secrets to Turkish 
State Monopolies, Division of cigarettes.

   The problem was prosody: stress on 'lies' rather than 'no' and 
the reduction of an important syllable 'ga'.  I just hope this 
business man hasn't told too many people where he works!  Cheers, 
Marolyn

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Date: Mon, 6 Feb 1995 12:03:25 EST
From: Marolyn Mcdiarmid 
To: Multiple recipients of list TESL-L 
Subject: prosody

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