Re: How you pronunce foreign place names

Eugene Oh wrote:
> 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]
I'd probably do something between 1 and 2, using English sounds but
trying to sound as close to the Chinese pronunciation as I can. No point
in trying to Anglicize the name too much when we already have Peking.
But it happens that Běijīng has a pattern of tones not too different
from /beI'dZIN/ as pronounced in English, and the consonants are not too
different either: [p] and [b] are both heard as /b/. So it's not too far
out of place to give "Beijing" a touch of a Chinese accent.

> 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).

> 4. Pronounce it otherwise?
>
> Ditto for "Paris", "Seoul", "Kagoshima", "Iraq", "Madrid", "Havana",
> "São Paulo" etc.
Paris is always /'pErIs/, whether Texas or France. Likewise, France is
always /'fr&ns/. (Keep in mind when I write /r/ it's the American
approximant, which is conventionally written [r\] but isn't really that
either.)

Seoul is /'soUl/, as that's about as close as you can get in English
anyway. I don't know the Japanese accent pattern for "Kagoshima", but
I'd pronounce it to rhyme with "Hiroshima", both accented on the O. I've
also heard "Hiroshima" accented on the third syllable.

Unless I'm talking with someone who says /aI'r&k/, in which case I might
subconsciously pick up that pronunciation for the moment, I'm more
likely to say /i'rAk/ or /I'rAk/. I wouldn't put a [q] at the end of
that when speakiing English. Madrid and Havana are anglicized, /m@'drId/
and /h@'v&n@/. "São Paulo" I'm likely to say without nasalizing the
vowel, /saU 'paUlo/.

In general, when names have long-established English equivalents I'll
use those. I don't know how long it's going to take before I can
remember to say Mumbai instead of Bombay. And just how ís Myanmar
supposed to be pronounced in English, anyway?

Now the conventions for Minza are a bit different, but not all that
much. Minza still adapts foreign names to the Minza phoneme inventory,
but borrowed names can violate some of the phonological patterns of
native Minza words. The word for Switzerland, "ta-Švaic", illustrates
this with its initial šv- cluster, otherwise unheard of in Minza. In
older versions of Minza I'd put an extra vowel in there to break up the
cluster, "ta-Šavaic", but I've abandoned that convention. "Ta-Braziu",
Brazil, has an exceptional pronunciation of /iu/ as [iw], which in
native Minza words is /ju/. But Minza has its own conventional names, as
"ta-Połki" for Poland for instance, or "ta-Nglissi" for England.

Reply