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

John Cowan:
> Trebor Jung scripsit:
>
> > Ah, reminds me of the time (among a few) that I heard someone pronounce
> > the <sz> in the Hungarian name <L\341szl\363> as [z] (the correct
> > pronunciation is [s]). In this case (now that I think about it) one
> > person who I remember mispronouncing <sz> was married to a Hungarian!
>
> An actual Hungarian, or a North American of Hungarian origin?  I think
> that most Laszlos in N.A. call themselves ['l&zlou].
In English, /s/ and /z/ are neutralized morpheme-internally before
sonorants in the following onset. So ['l&zlou] is not merely a
spelling pronunciation, but a regular anglicization. That said, I
have noticed that <sz> in Hungarian surnames of English people does
get done as /z/ (e.g. the English poet George Szirtes is called
/'z3:ti:z/ by others &, I believe, himself, instead of (in English
phonology) /'sI@tES/; I expect he got fed up of correcting
mispronunciations of his name and acquiesced in its mispronounciation,
just as I have done with mine for the last ten years or so, and as,
say, Italoamericans with <gli> in their names do). Come to think of
it, <zs> gets turned into /z/ too. And while Kovacs ends in
/ks/, I recall an American-footballer called Larry Csonka, who
was rendered Zonka (as if, perhaps, the spellings were <Kovax> and
<Xonka>?).

--And.

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