I was hearing the "song" -not my cup of tea- a couple of times, and I understand it clearer every time. It's what happen with foreign accents. The person who sings has an Americanized accent, and sings like Spanish is not his first language -I'm not saying it isn't-. There are parts of it that reminds me of the way Black Cubans talk (and the way thousands and thousands of immigrants from Nigeria, Liberia, Gambia and Guinea here talk)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Perikles
These are not examples of bad pronunciation. These elisions have been part of the English language for centuries, and are perfectly correct English. (But I would never use "whatever" in that context  )
Only when I have to. The level of English on that program is deplorable.
By the way - the program is called " Britain's got Talent" which is correct English. 
This is a red herring. OED gives the schwa as standard for the indefinite article a, and /eɪ/ for a stressed form. e.g. can I have a biscuit? (schwa). Here are two biscuits! But I asked for a biscuit (/eɪ/). This is exactly how I pronounce it.
Yes, I am
(Note the stressed form "I am". In a sentence I would always say "I'm") |
What you're calling standard English, and the whole RP, were what I was talking about
. English, by its own nature, has built-in all those quirks I mentioned. You seem to think that what consider "bad pronunciation" makes English a different language.
Let's revise:
El castellano sigue un ritmo silábico. El inglés sigue el ritmo dictado por el acento tónico. Como consecuencia, las vocales castellanas casi no cambian al comparar sílabas acentuadas con las que no son. Todo lo contrario de lo que ocurre en inglés.
I suffices to look to the pronunciation of produce/produce, contract/contract, project/project, present/present, etc.
When my parents lived in the States -before my birth, my father got a specialization scholarship- my mother had lots of problems to make herself understood, once she decided to start pronouncing "cualquier, pero cualquier cosa" in the non stressed syllables, and surprisingly she could communicate much effectively. I imagined her saying "The capital of Canada is Ottawa" and not being understood, and changing to "d CAptl of CAn
id
e is Ot
ew
e" and succeeding.
To round this up, there's not a good scientific experiment to hear many times a song with transcribed lyrics until you finally "hear it". The right experiment is hear a song which lyrics aren't published on the Internet nor available in the video. I want to test what your pals understand 
. If its any consolation I have heard a record of a conversations that I couldn't understand in the very least, until a few strangely familiar words started to emerge: it was Spanish. Argentine Spanish. Buenos Aires' Spanish. My native language.