Re: How you pronunce foreign place names

Quoting Eugene Oh <un.doing@...>:

> In writing the reply to Leon's questions about Pinyin, I used the word
> "Beijing", which made me curious as to how people habitually pronounce
> the names of foreign places when speaking in a certain language.
>
> E.g. "Beijing" in English -- upon encountering this word, do you
>
> 1. Attempt to pronounce it as close to the native as possible
> 2. Use English rules of pronunciation to read it [beIdZIN]
> 3. Pronounce it Englishly, butwith some exoticisation [beIZIN]
> 4. Pronounce it otherwise?
In English option 2, ie. [bej'dZIN]. In Swedish [be'jIN], which would be either
option 2 or 4; I imagine it represents someone's attempt at reading it
according to Swedish rules, but I myself would probably have hit on **['bEjIN]
if doing that.

> Ditto for "Paris", "Seoul", "Kagoshima", "Iraq", "Madrid", "Havana",
> "São Paulo" etc.
Most of those I just about never use in English. In Swedish, they're [pa'r`i:s],
[se'u:l], [,kA:gu'Si:ma], [Ir`A:k], [ma'dr`i:d], [ha'vana], and [sA:U 'paU)lU].
As you perhaps can tell, those are pretty much just the words read with Swedish
orthographic goggles, which is the usual way to treat foreign toponyms in
Swedish. The exceptions I can think of in a hurry are all from English-speaking
countries - eg. [jo:k], [lOs 'E:njElEs], ['sIdni] - which no doubt reflects the
fact that English is far and away the most well-known foreign language here.

We're sometimes told we should use the natively prefered names of countries and
places - eg. Myanmar rather than Burma, Mumbai rather than Bombay, and even
Belarus rather than Vitryssland - but I can't recall anyone ever arguing we
should use native *pronounciations* of those names.

                                                    Andreas

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