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

On Mon, 14 May 2001, dirk elzinga wrote:

> 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/ (!).
>
In which case I would immediately assume they are talking about Elsinore
(Helsingo/r) in Denmark... =)

It's actually rather amusing to hear people try to say my last name...I've
hear [va"lA:tSi], [va"lA:ksi], [va"loutSi], [va"lA:ski] and many others.
I'm a bit recalcitrant and I insist on people getting as close as they can
to the proper pronunciation of ["va:lo:tsi], which generally ends up as
["va:lVtsi], which is close enough I guess. My sister though, in Hungary
or with Hungarian speakers naturally uses the proper pronunciation, but
with non-Hungarian speakers uses [va"lousi] (which makes me cringe... =) )
Interesting this is, how the pronunciation of names change...

-------ferko
Ferenc Gy. Valoczy

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