Hyperforeign

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.

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].

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.