Re: YAEPT: How you pronunce foreign place names

Mark J. Reed wrote:
> On 1/21/07, Carsten Becker <carbeck@...> wrote:
>> /pa."Ris/
>
> Interesting.  Keep the French stress but pronounce the final S...
>
>> *) Where goes the stress? Is it analogue to /hi."RO.Si.ma/
>> or is it /ka.go."Si.ma/? Where is that city, anyway? That's
>> by chance not the same as Hiroshima, or is it?
>
> Japanese has no phonemic stress, so it sort of doesn't matter.  In
> English we teach people to say hi'roshima instead of hiro'shima
> because the latter tends to come out hiroshiima, with a long I.
> Putting two syllables after the stress mitigates the lengthening
> effect, so hi'roshima comes out closer to the Japanese.
Well, Japanese has contrastive tone patterns ("HAshi wa" vs. "haSHI wa"
vs. "haSHI WA"), which sound to English speakers like differences in
stress. In any case, given a number of possible English stress patterns,
one of them is going to sound more like the original Japanese than the
others.

I play a game on the Playstation 2 that I've heard others pronounce as
"Katamari da-MAH-see", with the stress on the middle syllable, but in
all the songs in the game it sounds like "DAH-ma-shee" or "dah-ma-SEE"
because of where the accented beat goes in the song. So I've been trying
to change my pronunciation to /'dAm@si:/ with the stress on the first
syllable. At any rate, that fits with English words like "lunacy" or
"diplomacy".