Re: CHAT: barbarisms (was: CHAT: Being both theologically correct and properly modern)

On Mon, 14 May 2001, BP Jonsson wrote:

> At 08:22 2001-05-13 -0600, dirk elzinga wrote:
>
> >My surname is most often pronounced with stress on the
> >penultima, [El.'ziN.g@] rather than with native Frisian initial
> >syllable stress: ['El.ziN.Xa]. The English accentuation fits the
> >"Latinate" pattern, but "Elzinga" is certainly not a name taken
> >from Classical Antiquity.
>
> Which pronunciation do you use yourself?
When I was in the Netherlands, I used the Frisian/Dutch
pronunciation (of course!). Here, I use the Anglicized
['El.'ziN.g@] since I find that people are too disconcerted to
hear: 1) initial stress on a word of more than two syllables
which ends in a vowel, and 2) the Dutch velar fricative. Some
people do give the name initial stress ['El.ziN.g@], but the
final vowel annoyingly often becomes a syllabic /r/ (!).

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga                          dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu

"The strong craving for a simple formula
has been the undoing of linguists."               - Edward Sapir

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