Re: YAEPT: How you pronunce foreign place names

I'm personally of the opinion that, wherever possible, place
place names should get as close as possible to the original
pronunciation _using only the phonemes available in the lang
you're speaking_.  Including sounds alien to your language
seems pretentious - but equally, over-mangling a name when
there's an anglicisation (or whatever-isation) which is closer
to the original just seems wilfully ignorant to me.  I do let
some unstressed vowels get schwa-ified, though.

I also appear to dislike destroying the timing of words more
than I dislike destroying the sounds.  If a short vowel in a
foreign word can only exist in English as a long one, I
prefer to alter the vowel than lengthen it.  An example that
springs to mind is "clique" (/klIk/ rather than /kli:k/).
From Eugene's list: I say /I'r\ak/ rather than /I'r\A:k/ (the
latter appears to be common on the news here in the UK).

Of course, there are also a lot of exceptions to these rules
in my speech, for two main reasons:

(1) when a name is already in sufficiently common usage to
    have its own "standard" pronunciation (e.g. "Paris", and
    from the list, "Beijing" /beIZIN/);

(2) when I don't know enough about the language in question
    to make a decent stab at it (e.g. "Seoul").

But examples of things I do say are: Boulogne /b@'lonj/
rather than the very common yet inexplicable /b@'loin/;
Reykjavik gets its /ei/; and I feel I can get away with a
balanced two-syllable version of Tokyo rather than the usual
three-syllable anglicisation despite rule (1), because people
don't tend to notice.  :-)

As an aside, I'm reminded of a guy I saw on TV recently (on
the snooker) whose name was "Junhui"; they were pronouncing it
/dZVN'wi:/ as far as I recall.  What's it supposed to be, OOI?


K.

(Disclaimer: I might suck at X-SAMPA)

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