Let me be the first to admit that my methods are non-scientific. I'm just a layperson with no reliable scientific equipment or laboratory to conduct my experiments. But I have taken a keen interest in your pronunciation of the word giardiniera, and at the risk of sounding immodest, I have to say that my findings are certainly worthy of a second look. Come on, sit down - I've printed out a copy of the analysis that we can go over.
Let's start with the executive summary. This one-sheet breaks down my conclusions by heading. First off, you'll notice that the most surprising discovery is the wild variance that has been occurring from instance to instance. This was chief among the unexpected results. Going in, my hypothesis - that's this deck here - was that your delivery would experience slight differences in tone and inflection, but that core pronunciation would not deviate very much from the mean. You can see that here in red. Right, CP is core pronunciation.
Well, imagine my surprise when, after the first week, there didn't seem to be anything like a core pronunciation! It began an irrelevant standard by which to compare subsequent instances. I know, I was really surprised. I had no idea how your speech patterns determined what syllable the emphasis should go on, let alone if there would be any silent vowels!
I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start here. This bar graph is probably the most striking visual indicator of the trends I observed. You start of with a fairly predictable "zheear" sound. This seems to capture all the letters of the first syllable, and from what I could tell, did not prove difficult to emit. That's why it gets a 1.2 on the difficulty scale. Comparably, it got a 4.6 on the PPSS, or post-pronunciation satisfaction scale. That measures your relative comfort immediately after saying the word, as indicated by facial expression, posture, and hand placement. It's an aggregated score from those factors.
Then here...here, you change your pronunciation inexplicably. For three instances straight, you use a more rudimentary "jar" sound to begin the word. The crazy part? Your DS and PPSS scores mark no significant deviation! I couldn't support any reasoning for the change during my etymological research, so I decide to just wait and see if a pattern would develop. Boy, was I wrong!
Results for the pronunciation of the second syllable were more stable. Only once did you clearly saw "dee" instead of the usual "dih" sound you usually uttered. I noted this anomaly but really feel like it's not indicative of a larger trend. Jar-DEE-nera! I made a note about its marked hilarity.
On page 19, we see the results of the concluding syllables. Again, we're bag to the erratic patterns we saw earlier. You've got several clear instances of "neh-ra". This is commonly observed among different test cases, and registers very mild to moderate levels on the PPSS and essentially nothing on the DS. I pretty much thought this was a standard, until here...where we see you very overtly switched to a three-syllable pronunciation of this section - that's right, "nee-air-a". At first I thought it was a mistake, maybe brought on by a cold or that time you were sad about your bike being stolen, but I soon realized it was definitely a conscious choice. And, as you'll see here, with essentially no trace of self-doubt or embarrassment! I was flabbergasted. Were all words malleable to you, or just ones with a foreign origin, here documented as forigin? Were you just hedging your bets by using a range of all possible pronunciations?
So that's basically it. Next step is to go back and update my hypothesis, then shop it around on the journal circuit. As a follow-up, I was pondering do a study on your treatment of lettuce-clippings; I've just casually noticed everything from disgust to eager consumption and I just bet there's a bigger story to tell. Sign this release.
