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Usenet Posted 23 years ago
Usage

Indiaspeak

Anymore, if you call customer support for help with computer problems, you have a good chance of being put through to a helper in India. This gives you an opportunity to sample the oddities of Indian English.
In my recent experience, two Indian-English words that defied comprehension were "connet", pronounced ('kAn@t) ("KAHnuht"), and "suppert", pronounced ('SVp@rt)
("SUPPert").
When the man asked me "Did you connet the disk?", I was completely baffled, and getting him to spell it for me was no help at first. He replied "c-o-n-n-e-t". But after a minute or so, he said, "I'm sorry, Bob, I spelled it wrong: It's "c-o-n-n-e-c-t".
"Suppert" was almost as bad. He was saying rather rapidly "Doubleya doubleya doubleya dot Gateway dot SUPPert dot com". In this case, when I asked him to spell that funny word after "Gateway dot", his first spelling was correct: "s-u-p-p-o-r-t".
In Calcutta during World War II, I heard ('Av@l@b@l) ("AHvuhluhbuhl") for "available". A friend of mine foolishly tried to get the man to pronounce it right, but the man was confident his pronunciation was the correct one.
  

Top answer

[nq:1]Anymore, if you call customer support for help with computer problems, you have a good chance of being put through ... [/nq] Probably no worse than Geordie English. Tombola Hindustani ?

  • [nq:1]Anymore, if you call customer support for help with computer problems, you have a good chance of being put through ...
  • [/nq] Probably no worse than Geordie English.
  • Tombola Hindustani ?
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7 Answers
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[nq:1]Anymore, if you call customer support for help with computer problems, you have a good chance of being put through ... tried to get the man to pronounce it right, but the man was confident his pronunciation was the correct one.[/nq]
Probably no worse than Geordie English.
Tombola Hindustani ?
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[nq:1]Anymore, if you call customer support for help with computer problems, you have a good chance of being put through ... tried to get the man to pronounce it right, but the man was confident his pronunciation was the correct one.[/nq]
First Indian Gentleman: "It is spelled W-O-M-B!"
Second Indian Gentleman: "No, no, no, it is spelled W-O-O-M!"

Helpful Englishman: "I think you
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[nq:1]Anymore, if you call customer support for help with computer problems, you have a good chance of being put through to a helper in India. This gives you an opportunity to sample the oddities of Indian English.[/nq]
The last Indian supporter I talked to had an excellent American accent. I complimented him on it. He was quite pleased.
[nq:1]In my recent experience, two Indian-English wo
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[nq:1]In my recent experience, two Indian-English words that defied comprehension were "connet", pronounced ('kAn@t) ("KAHnuht"), and "suppert", pronounced ('SVp@rt) ("SUPPert"). ... tried to get the man to pronounce it right, but the man was confident his pronunciation was the correct one.[/nq]
This is a common problem: English is so far from being a genuinely foreign language in India and Pa
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Mike Lyle wibbled
[nq:1](I may have mentioned before that I'm haunted by an incident in a documentary in which a British patient was ... one category of patient which had imperatively to be seen by doctors of the same national background was the psychiatric.)[/nq]
It would help with most categories of patient IME - being mystified by a Chinese midwife talking about Lycra* at 3am did nothin
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[nq:1]Mike Lyle wibbled[/nq]
[nq:2](I may have mentioned before that I'm haunted by an ... by doctors of the same national background was the psychiatric.)[/nq]
[nq:1]It would help with most categories of patient IME - being mystified by a Chinese midwife talking about Lycra* at ... Still not the word most people would recognise ('waters' being far more common) but much more understandable
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Quoth Bob Cunningham:
[nq:1]"Suppert" was almost as bad. He was saying rather rapidly "Doubleya doubleya doubleya dot Gateway dot SUPPert dot com". In this case, when I asked him to spell that funny word after "Gateway dot", his first spelling was correct: "s-u-p-p-o-r-t".[/nq]
Didn't you know? There is no such thing as a free suppert.

Oliver Cromm
Fatal exception in module gr

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