Friday 23 September 2011

Luciano Canepari’s reply

My followers might be interested in reading Mr Canepari’s reply to my post of 16th September 2011, entitled English pronunciation for Italians:







(This article was to be found on Mr. Canepari's website under the heading “Beware of the web! – September 2011”, but now seems to have been removed by the author. Something along the same lines can be accessed here.) 

Personally, I don’t feel like answering back. 

Actions speak louder than words! My students, colleagues, friends, and family, all know what I’m talking about!

UPDATE: See what Graham Pointon, a phonetician and former Head of the BBC's Pronunciation Unit, has to say about Mr Canepari in this post of his

8 comments:

  1. Dear Mr Canepari,
    Your snooty and contemptuous approach shown in your posted answer is a disappointing professional attitude. Criticizing someone just because is making his own brain work and "dares" to bring certain written rules into question is an anti-intellectual behaviour.

    Best regards,


    Corinna Errico

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  2. Alex,

    I think you are quite right to maintain a dignified silence in face of such rubbish.

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  3. Well, well, well, "anonymous" Corinna Errico,
    you missed a spledid opportunity of keeping your mouth shut, instead of talking crap!

    Obvoiuosly, you don't know what a professional attitude is, if you run the risk of standing up like that, for such a fake guru as yours. His latest poster clearly reveals that he has perilously wrong ideas even about the English language. On an older poster he "shows" that in Italy the name of the Italian region Umbria is pronounced ['u:mbRia], instead of actual ['um:bRja]! Now, does a blunder like that show "professionality"? Of course, he would promptly say that he can also hear ['uu˙bRja] (could he be able to transcribe like that). Note that I avoid here more realistic and necessary tonetic regional markings, for pronunciations that nobody sane could actually suggest. But he doesn't know that that is a regional pronunciation, as there are very many others, as well, to say nothing of all the foreign pronounciations we all can hear every day. Should we accept all of them, uncritically?
    Most probably, you didn't understand that he explicitly slandered Luciano Canepari, by hazardously saying (or writing!) that English PronunciationS to him "looks like a very bad carbon copy of Wells's Accents of English" (with too scanty transcriptions and practically no articulatory figure for vowels, consonants and intonation). There lies the rub!
    Your protégé says that he owns all Canepari's books. I'd like to see his personal list of those books! Perhaps he does own them, but why doesn't he read them, then? EP is a real mine of information and precise descriptions. And just by looking at a single page of it, even without fully understanding it, in comparison with one of AE, he might immediately realize that the latter almost tells cracks. In an apparently corresponding number of pages, EP provides three times more material than EA does, and three times more precisely. All this, pace his too friendly supporter in London (who produces simplistic and highly useless transcriptions, in a thing called English Transcription Course — the very negation of reality, that deceives people, who learn a bad pronunciation, convinced to be smart and good).

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  4. Maurizio,
    This is very strange; I've just realized that the answer to your comment is precisely the comment you commented, ie. "Your snooty and contemptuous approach shown in your posted answer is a disappointing professional attitude. Criticizing someone just because is making his own brain work and "dares" to bring certain written rules into question is an anti-intellectual behaviour."

    Haven't you got any relatives living in Canada?

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  5. Sorry, I meant "...the comment you commented ON"
    (Phew!)

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  6. What's the fuss?
    I am studying American English, and the only linguistic ''authority'' I respect is the MW's Learner's dictionary
    http://www.learnersdictionary.com/

    The pronunciation given is the one used in the American West and popularized by Hollywood. (I couldn't care less for East Coast-based US media, I don't follow them).

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  7. Unbelievable! I've just read Canepari's answer and I'm flabbergasted at his arrogance, disrespect and pompousness. And yet HE and his minions have the cheek of accusing Alex of the same! Unbelievable. It makes me ashamed of being Italian, makes me think of Scilipoti and similar Italian disgraces.

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