Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.

Oh, and I didn't address your first question:

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 4:53 PM, Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...> wrote:
> 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?
Secondary stress.  That is, the stress pattern is the same as if it
were the two words 'hiro 'shima, but with the stress in the second
"word" more pronounced.

And while I'm back here...

> 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.
It's not necessarily "careless", and Anglicization is not
"degradation".  Please avoid such loaded terms.

Loanwords - and place names that are sufficiently well-known to be
essentially loanwords - get adapted to the phonology of the lessee
language.  English is hardly unique in this, although we do have an
excess of loanwords and the whole "ginormous population largely
isolated from contact with other languages" thing exaggerating the
effect.  But I don't see why other languages should be immune from the
drive.  Shouldn't Hispanoparlantes refer to [nu yO`r\k] instead of
[nweBa j\o4k]?

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].

> 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.

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

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