Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 8:28 AM, Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...> wrote:
> At least, what's wrong with trying to imitate a reasonably correct
> pronunciation of Milano and Torino for example?
Well, that's a case where the names are older than the language
currently spoken there.  Milan and Turin come down to us from Latin,
having been established in English before there was such a thing as
"Italian".  It is, as you say, "just" tradition, but tradition is a
powerful force, not easily diverted.

> If a Hispanic TV presenter
> actually is bilingual, I think it must feel the most natural for him to
> pronounce his name the way it was given to him, and if he does it for any
> conscious reason at all, it's for a matter of ethnic pride, not to raise
> laughs, for sure.
If they were raised in a bilingual environment, they probably feel
equally natural with both pronunciations of their name and
automatically use the appropriate one in context; in that case,
failing to do so is a conscious affectation.  If they acquired English
later in life than that, that's different.

> But it is noticeable that Britons tend to do better with European
> names than Americans do, and the other way around with Asian names for
> example.
Proximity would seem to explain the former.  I don't know what's up
with the latter.


>> it'd still be Anglicized to something like [s@k_ha`r\t'vEloU].
> You sure about that E?
Of course not; I'm just hypothesizing.  It could be [eI] or [i] instead...

>>> I guess the phonetics of English makes it more difficult to pronounce
>>> foreign names than in many other
>>> languages.
>>
>> I don't really think that's true, although I don't have any evidence
>> one way or the other.
>
> So it's just the attitude, then?
I wouldn't say attitude - not more than that, at this point, because
you can acquire the tendencies just by growing up here, even if you
don't inherit the attitude along with them.   It's a feature of the
culture.

But even disregarding that, I don't think the sound set of English is
the problem so much as the lack of exposure to sounds outside that
set.  Europeans hear a lot more languages than we do in everyday life,
I'd wager.  Without such exposure at a young age, you lose the ability
to hear and make distinctions that aren't in your L1, and the end
result is that no matter how open-minded and sincerely interested in
learning you are, you may not be able to sound much better than Peggy
Hill's Spanish (PH is a character on "King of the Hill", who speaks
fluent Spanish, but with a terrible Texas accent.  [bweInoUs 'dij@s]!
[k_hoUmoU Es'ta ustejEd]?)

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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