Re: Ethiopia et al. (was NATLANGS: What's that writing system?)

On 7/10/06, Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:

> Pronouncing foreign names correctly seems to raise eyebrows in certain American
> circles (even worldly, well-educated ones).
As I've said on here before, pronouncing "foreign" names "correctly"
(uh-oh, I'm slipping under the spell of the over-"quoters"!  Help!
"Help!" I cried...) is completely a matter of context.  If I'm
speaking English casually with a fellow Anglophone, then tubular
tortilla-wrapped meat/bean items are [br\=i:doUz], the green stuff
sometimes found on same is [gwak@'moUli], the crunchy things are
['t_hakouz], etc.  (Although I have been known to make fun of one my
British expat colleagues - always to his face, of course - by saying
['t_h&kouz] with exaggerated emphasis on the [&] :))

But if I'm ordering those dishes in a sit-down Mexican restaurant
staffed by actual Mexicans, I'm as likely as not to order in Spanish,
in which case those same items are [bu'r:itos], [(G)waka'mole], and
['takos] respectively.  In such cases I used to feel a little silly
ordering a "little donkey" or a "wad", but I've gotten over it. :)

Anyway, to my ear, going out of one's way to pronounce a name
according to native language rules, when said name has a
well-established Anglicized form, just sounds pretentious.   As you
say, we'll always have [p_hE`r\@s], and when someone says that they've
just gotten back from [paRi] while otherwise speaking only English, I
can't help but roll my eyes. I react similarly to my friends and
coworkers who talk about their upcoming vacation to [h@waiji] but then
come back gushing about their fun visit to  [h@vai?i]; that one is
especially annoying as it carries over into print as an apostrophe
they never typed before.

> I've been blasted for referring to [ke'bEk];
Probably not recently, though?  That's a case where the usual
pronunciation is shifting to match the native one.  I still think that
[ke'bEk] (or, as it more usually comes out in this context, ['ke.bEk])
is a somewhat counterintuitive choice for the letter Q in the *other*
"international phonetic alphabet", the one used for radio spelling.

> back in the 80s SNL did a good skit on newscasters going into
> contortions to get [nika'ragwa] and other Hispanic names right.
You mean [nika'raGwa], surely?  And its capital [ma'naGwa].  With the
[sandinistas], not to be confused with the [s&nd@nist@z].

The one that always gets me is "Mexico", though.   There seems to be
no correct answer there.  Whether you're speaking English or Spanish,
and whether you say [ks] or [x], you  still seem likely as not to
offend someone...

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>