Re: How you pronunce foreign place names

On Wednesday 24 January 2007 04:49, li_sasxsek@nutter.net wrote:
> li [Mark J. Reed] mi tulis la
>
> > When sufficiently educated (whether formally or via life experience),
> > Anglophones have two distinct sets of rules for converting unfamiliar
> > written words to speech sounds: one for English words and one for
> > "foreign" words.  The latter includes the Latin vowels, /Z/ or /j/ for
> >
> > |j|,  etc.  So unfamiliar names often come out with a pronunciation
> >
> > that conforms to neither Englsh or native patterns.
>
> I wonder how much of this is related to French.  After all, English
> borrowed a lot of vocabulary from French over its history and possibly left
> a legacy of <j> being /Z/ in loanwords, at least until the loanwords become
> more assimilated where they will take on the fully anglicized /dZ/.  We
> still have words like "garage" with the last <g> being /dZ/ or /Z/
> depending on the speaker.
Actually, if I remember my dabbling in Old French well enough, Old French (in
the Ile de France region) _did_ pronounce 'j' as /dZ/, and English would then
have picked the phoneme up from Old French and Norman French.

Words in English with /dZ/ with cognates in French with /Z/ would then be
fossils of the older pronunciation.

Old English had the semivowel 'y' (as 'ge') where German has 'g', so I think
the /dZ/ phoneme actually came from Old French borrowings - Old English, if
left to go its own way with a minimal of Romance borrowings and no
Norman/Acquitainian court influences, would have ended up a lot more like
Frisian and Low Saxon/Niedersassisch/Plattdeutsch.

Just my 0.02c worth, highly inflated, of course! ;)

Wesley Parish
--
Clinersterton beademung, with all of love - RIP James Blish
-----
Mau e ki, he aha te mea nui?
You ask, what is the most important thing?
Maku e ki, he tangata, he tangata, he tangata.
I reply, it is people, it is people, it is people.

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