> [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf Of Lars Finsen
> ... 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.
It's clearly a conscious effort, and certainly not for laughs
but part of some politically correct agenda put out by the
media. I grew up in the L.A. area where every television
station has to have at least one token hispanic that does this,
but the Asians reporters don't.
> ... Your ['azloU] is rather a lot more different from the
local
> pronunciation of Oslo than what you find in most other
languages. (In fact
> the local pronunciation is more like ['u²Slu] - if I can use a
"²" for toneme
> 2. A retracted s before l is the norm in the east, where Oslo
is
> situated.)
I think a part of this has to do with orthography. For some
reason we take foreign names in Roman script and retain the
spelling so we tend to pronounce them based upon their spelling.
Maybe we should start altering the spellings to make the
pronunciation easier. We could start writing "Ushlu" instead of
"Oslo"?
> > Now, there are cases where the standard English name is
> very different
> > from the native one, and it might eliminate some confusion
if we
> > adopted the latter - the whole Georgia (country) vs Georgia
> (US state)
> > thing comes to mind. But even there, if we did adopt the
> native name,
> > it'd still be Anglicized to something like
[s@k_ha`r\t'vEloU].
>
> You sure about that E?
> Anyhow, I guess Georgia, the country, is known as Georgia in
just
> about every language in the world.
This is one of the reasons I prefer native names. It helps
disambiguate things in many situations. In Sasxsek, I
considered the naming scheme for a long time. Finally I settled
on using native names, but assimilating them phonemically.
"Georgia", the country, becomes "sakartvelo" while the US state
becomes "jorjx", however unlike English, Sasxsek is intended to
be syllable-timed not stress-timed.
> >> 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?
There are some aspects of English that make it tough, but I'd
guess there are always going to be differing habits across any
two languages. Vowel reduction in English is probably the thing
that will alter the pronunciation the most.