Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.

Den 21. aug. 2008 kl. 02.17 skreiv Herman Miller:

> Thanks for the example. Ušlu would work in both Tirelat ['uSlu] and
> Minza ['us`lu], although Tirelat might assimilate the l to a
> voiceless fricative (Ušłu). I think this is one of many examples
> where the English name of a city differs from its local name (e.g.,
> Munich vs. München, Naples vs. Napoli), only in this case, they
> happen to be spelled the same. :-)
I think it's rather a case of borrowing the written form and guessing
its pronunciation based on the English pronunciation rules. The city
has been known as Oslo only since 1925. Oslo was the name of a small
town to the east of the present city centre, briefly used as a
capital by the last Norwegian kings from around 1300. It gradually
fell into disuse, but from 1624, the Danish king Christian IV had a
new town built 2 kms to the west and made it his Norwegian residence,
naming it after himself. The old Oslo now is well inside the city
limits, but largely unbuilt, regulated as a park with ruins of the
old town. After independence and inspired by the 300th anniversary,
they decided to adopt the old name, which probably had been forgotten
completely in the world outside by then.

Den 20. aug. 2008 kl. 19.03 skreiv ROGER MILLS:
>
> The phonetics of other languages I think present plenty of problems
> when their speakers go to learn English--our /T, D, @, r\ / and the
> contrast between /i I, e E, u U/ are major stumbling blocks.
Especially the latter, I think. You won't easily find any foreigner
catching a hold of those contrasts right away.

> Nativized forms of many well-known place names exist and are of
> long standing. What do Norwegians call Moscow?  Not [moskva] I'll
> wager.
You just lost a wager. It's pretty common here to stress the first
syllable, but when we do, there's often someone nearby who will jump
in to correct us.

The Russians themselves actually pronounce the vowels differently. I
wouldn't venture to put ut the actual CXS for it.

I don't want to abolish nativisation. I'm just commenting that I
think it's overdone in the English-speaking world, to an extent that
to me seems ridiculous, and the only reason I'm doing it is because
there are so many defending the practice.

It's barely on-topic, so I won't say much after this. But I am
considering how my Urianians are doing nativisation. They have been
around since before the Roman empire, and many foreign names have
been known to them since those days. They probably still use some of
them, but others may have been replaced after having become
unrecognisable.

There is, by the way, one language that nativises even more weirdly
than English: the Welsh.

Dana Nutter wrote:
>> quoting David McCann
>> ... People who'd never sully their tongues with Bombay
>> are still content with Athens and Copenhagen. Political correctness
>> strikes again?
>
> I'd have no problem with "Athina" or "Kuppenhaun".
What about "København"? For the proper CXS of this you must ask the
other Lars (Lars_1), but it may be something like /k9Bnh{un/ or even /
k9wnh{un/ if the 9 rounds the following sound.

> 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"?
Yes, and then maybe not.

One main reason for the weirdness of many of the nativisations in
English of course is that the names and things are borrowed in their
written form and the pronunciation guessed on the basis of that. What
if "burrito" had been borrowed only as hearsay, how would you write
it in English? "Britto"?

Written borrowings are the norm in our days of high alphabetisation.
We are doing the same here, but the Norwegian phonetics aren't that
different from the Spanish. Still there are some changes. The usual
way to pronounce the word here is /b}r'itu/. Pretty bad? But at
least, the second syllable stress is kept.

> Vowel reduction in English is probably the thing
> that will alter the pronunciation the most.
I would say diphthongisation does a lot, too.

Den 20. aug. 2008 kl. 16.07 skreiv David McCann:

> This seems a very Anglo-Saxon thing. I've got a German book on the
> shelves nearby that consistently uses Libau, Dünaburg, Wenden, etc
> for
> Liepāja, Daugavpils, and Cēsis (Latvia) and I'm sure it's authors
> didn't
> feel guilty.
Well, the Germans perhaps are even more notorious than the English
for having their own names for everything. Many of the German names
were borrowed into Scandinavian, too, but have since been replaced.
We formerly used Prag for Praha, for example, and Neapel for Napoli.

But when you go to the Baltic, many of the towns if I remember right
were actually built by the Germans and the German names were the
original ones. Not sure about those you mention, however.

Mark J. Reed wrote:
> quoting me:
>> 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,
>
> 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;
Well, don't you think the fact that their names actually are Spanish
could lead to a natural inclination for the Spanish pronunciation?

Still I think it's likely a conscious "affectation".

> 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
Yes, that's a good point, too. I've heard it mentioned elsewhere as
well.

> (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]?)
That sounds interesting indeed....
I think I may have seen that show listed in some channel listing some
place hereabouts. Maybe I should take a look. Our commercial channels
buy a lot of second hand American serials. If the character was
introduced not more than 4-5 years ago, maybe I should wait for a
couple of seasons.

LEF

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