Re: CHAT: F.L.O.E.S.

Mark Reed:

> On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 07:38:22PM -0000, And Rosta wrote:
> > The reason for the cringe is the respective
> > treatments of foreign words in the two dialects; BrE uses short vowels
> > where AmE uses long (at least in rendering 'foreign' O and A). I get
> > terribly hot under the collar when my cafe companions order a lartay
> > ('lAteI -- this, like pizza, coming from America) & insist that
> > they repent and order lattay ('l&teI).
>
> Ugh.  Pronouncing "latte" with an [&] makes *my* skin crawl. :) While I
> believe in the Americanizing/Anglicizing of foreign borrowings, I do
> think the sounds ought to be close to the original where possible(*), and
> as the Italian vowel (whether [a] or [A]) is completely unproblematic in
> English phonology, I don't know why you would change it to [&].
The trad rule for Br English is to equate foreign short A E I O U
with English A E I O U (which are short monophthongs in BrE). Using
a long vowel to render _latte_ seems particularly crass; if the word
were _late_ I'd be more sympathetic. The fine-grained phonetic
detail is pretty irrelevant: the realizations of /&/ and /A/ vary
considerably from one accent to another. I for example realize both
with a quality in the region of [a].

My predilections are very much for anglicizing as much as possible,
ignoring the phonetics of the source, and wreaking capricious
corruption (harrycarry) hither and yon. (That's one of the things
I like about Byron; many of his rhymes only work if you follow
exactly my favoured principles.)

> And did you mean that pizza itself comes from America, or that
> British are adopting an American pronunciation of the word "pizza"
> (which around here is consistently ['pit:s@])?
Pizza itself. I have recently been hearing /'pAst@/ from English
mouths too, god help us.

--And.

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