Hyperforeign

This relation is further complicated by the literate persons who know something of the foreign pronunciation and orthography. A speaker who knows the spelling jabot and the English form [ˈžɛbow] (for French [žabo]), may revise tête-à-tête [ˈtejteˌtejt] (from French [tɛ:t a tɛːt]) to a hyper-foreign ['tejtetej], without the final [t].

Half-literate persons, who try, without proper knowledge, to pronounce a foreign language, are apt to coin hyper-foreign forms, a special kind of hyper-correction.

[pp 309–10] Professor Blau combines his thorough grounding in linguistics with vast knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and related languages to alert scholars to the occurrence of a phenomenon he terms “pseudo-corrections” in Semitic language texts. The term is a general one encompassing largely hyper-corrections which have been studied for some time in the Indo-European languages. Hyper-corrections occur when a speaker, or writer, attempts to correct his own speech by using forms from another speech which he regards as more prestigious, or “higher” than his own. When he uses a “higher” form incorrectly, producing a form that is correct in neither the “higher” nor “lower” speech, the form is called a hyper-correction by linguists. [p 310] Blau indicates that other pseudo-corrections may occur as the result of spelling pronunciations, reversal of sound shifts (regression), and may be found in hyper-foreign form, “inverted calques,” inverse spelling, and “literary pseudo-corrections” which are correct linguistically but incorrect stylistically.

Had the norms of Eng. phonotactics been violated by the stimulus words, there would probably have occurred all sorts of further distortions in the responses, cf. the well-known examples of what an impression of ‘foreignness’ can do on a stage of imperfect learning supplied by the English school tradition of trilled r in French, or the Danish hyperforeign pronunciation of German <z> as a voiced [dᶻ].

This playfulness and hyperforeign linguistic behavior is notably absent with [ŋ] in English, a sound that is systematically ruled out in initial position. Thus, speakers do not turn a name like Noam [noʷm] into *Ngoam [ŋoʷm] for any playful purpose or to underscore its seeming alien quality.