Re: How you pronunce foreign place names

li [Herman Miller] mi tulis la

> > 3. Pronounce it Englishly, butwith some exoticisation [beIZIN]
>
> Ugh. Now if I were speaking French or Portuguese that would
> make sense,
> but English has a perfectly good /dZ/ sound, and /Z/ might be
> mistaken
> for Chinese /r/. I don't expect reporters to know how Chinese /r/ is
> pronounced, but someone has got to let them hear a recording of how a
> native Chinese speaker pronounces Beijing (hint: they won't hear
> anything like a /Z/ in it).
Another one they are always messing up is Fallujah, saying it [f@luZ@]. There are some
versions of Arabic that pronounce ج as [Z] but not the Iraqi variety where it
is more likely to be [j] or [dZ]

	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic
 "ج jiim (CA /ʤ/) too varies widely. In some Arabian Bedouin dialects, and
parts of the Sudan, it is still realized as the medieval Persian linguist
Sibawayh described it, as a palatalized /gʲ/. In Egypt and Yemen, it is a
plain /g/. In most of North Africa and the Levant, it is /ʒ/, apart from
Algeria. In the Gulf and Iraq, it often becomes /j/. Elsewhere, it is usually
/ʤ/."

Reporters seem to be really bad about pronunciation, almost as if they are trying too
hard to sound "sophisticated" to cover up for not knowing how it should be
pronounced. It only demonstrates just how ignorant a lot of them are about the
things they are reporting on, beyong just the names, and I see the situation
constantly growing worse.

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