Topic: Deep fried in Butter.

[ELW]

I am reasonably certain (but would have to do some more research before I could assert this as a fact) that in at least some of the Indic languages, a/u similarly do not form a minimal pair.



Yes, if you look at the Wikipaedia page for Bengali phonology, you will see that the BUT vowel does not occur.  Thus a Bengali speaker, on hearing the BUT vowel in English, will (unless linguistically trained) automatically map it to the nearest vowel sound that does occur in Bengali, which is the BACK vowel (/

[Peripatetic Phil]

..failing that, he could just ask the guy next time he's in

Yes, he could.  But if the guy is a native Bengali speaker, the dialogue could well go like this:

Emin-J : "Excuse me, are your onion bhajis made of onions and spices fried in batter ?"
Bengali guy : "Yes sir".
Emin-J : "OK, thank you.  And could I ask  :  do you fry them in butter ?"
Bengali guy : "Yes sir, I just said that -- onions and spices fried in batter".
Emin-J.  "Ah ..."

Because, unless the Bengali guy has a particularly sensitive ear, or is 2nd-generation and therefore has English as his first language, he may simply be unable to hear the difference between "batter" and "butter", just as I cannot hear the difference between (say) "d?ngx?" and "d?ngxi" in Mandarin Chinese.

** Phil.

[PaulP]

It's hard to believe somebody put all that stuff on a curry forum.

 

[emin-j]

I had a similar conversation some time ago when I asked the boss of our closest t/a if he used food colouring in his base gravy to get such a vivid orange colour, he said firmly '' No,we use tamarind for colour we use no food colouring '' I asked if the tamarind was in powder form and he said '' I will show you'' he returned from the kitchen with the container off the chef's rack which was full of .........turmeric  : '' Ah ! Turmeric '' I said '' Yes Tamarind '' he said  :