Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.

Den 19. aug. 2008 kl. 20.37 skreiv Eugene Oh:
> I would consider Hi'roshima to be more "correct" than ,Hiro'shima,
Sorry, what does it signify that initial comma there?

> I'm ashamed to say I used to be guilty of A.T-ing, until I realised
> with a start one day how entirely pretentious and annoying I
> sounded. I used to actually believe that all things should be
> pronounced as natively as
> possible, but I've since woken up and realised why there are such
> concepts as "different languages" in the first place. (:
Well, but does this mean that all languages should have their own
ways for spelling and pronouncing every foreign name? I was subjected
to several rounds of an English spelling game called Oxford Dilemma
when I visited some Canadian relatives lately who had settled in
northern Norway, and I had a few pretty frustrating times over some
of the foreign names. Careless pronunciation of foreign words feels
disrespectful somehow, and from my point of view I find the
degradation of a perfectly fine word like burrito kind of
disconcerting. I guess the phonetics of English makes it more
difficult to pronounce foreign names than in many other languages. No
wonder we have so many YAEPTs here. Visiting Germans and Italians for
example don't have much difficulty producing recognisable
pronunciations of Norwegian names (also just as an example), but the
English, and I guess the French, have more problems. But why not at
least try? Because you don't need to, I guess...

LEF

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