Re: new Klingon spelling

Some people said (and a conversation ensued):

> > > To me, it sounds pretentious/snobbish - and in many cases is
> > > incomprehensible - when, in the middle of normal unaccented idiomatic
> > > English, someone (<koff>Trebek</koff>) breaks into another language's
> > > phonology just to pronounce the name of a country where that language
> > > is spoken.  I have the same reaction to [hA'wAj?i], which amounts to
> > > bragging that the speaker has actually visited that island paradise,
> > > unlike the boorish Ugly Mainlander listener who pronounces it without
> > > the glottal stop, tsk.
> >
> > *ignores ASCII IPA that he doesn't know how to read*
> >
> > Actually, it now very much aggravates me when people mispronounce
Japanese
> > words. Whenever I speak and use a native Japanese word, I make sure to
> > actually pronounce it correctly. Not necessarily with a Japanese accent,
but
> > I don't horribly misread the romaji. The primary three instances of this
I
> > can think of are "sake", "geisha", and "karaoke". That last one
irritates me
> > to no end whenever I hear it said "carry-okee".
>
> Well, 'tis my opinion that borrowed words are ours to mangle as we please.
> I might pronounce 'karaoke' as [k&rj8uk@i] (sorry to be like that, but
> there's no way to show that in English other than {karaoke} or {karaokee}
> or something) which would probably be totally unintelligible to a
> Japanese. But on this topic, you reasile the -oke bit is short for
> 'orchestra', so you probably should prounce it like you say up to the 'e'
> in orchestra if you want to be really correct.
Happen to have a handy link to reading ASCII IPA? (Not that vowels were ever
my strong point with IPA...)

Incidentally, I never knew the origin of "karaoke". I've wondered at it,
actually. If the "oke" is from "orchestra", what is the "kara" from?

And the way I pronounce the e in orchestra is closestly (heh, hooray for
neologisms) brought to Japanese as their "e".

Thing is, what constitutes a "borrowed word". That is, at what point is it
okay for us to mangle as we please? :P

>
> > Then again, I don't mind when people pronounce words native-like when
> > speaking. To me, it's kind of a way of respecting the native language,
> > instead of mangling it to high heaven like we bloody Americans already
do
> > with everything else.
>
> Well, the thing about language is its not always easy for people to learn
> the phonemes of foreign languages, and when yo ucan, it might be harder to
> put them together in ways that your own language doesn't allow. I for
> instance had a hard time being able to go from one vowel to another
> without something in between (so that /karaoke/ would have been rendered
> as something more like [karar\oke] at best). Don't cringe, just accept it
> :) Anyway, borrowing words according to a set of rules is fun (note to
> self:  create rules for borrowings words into Modern Føtisk after deciding
> upon its phonology).
Oh, I agree. Like I said, I don't expect the accent to be dead-on. I'm more
annoyed when people add what I consider a long "e" sound when there is just
an "a" and an "o". It's like we don't even look at how the word is spelled
when we pronounce it! (Not that we ever do with say, ough, but that's
irrelevant...)

I'll admit, actually, that when I started doing Japanese, "aoi" was a
tongue-twister, because I'm not used to doing three vowels in a row. If
people just didn't pronounce the "o" or the "a" in "karaoke", I wouldn't be
quite so annoyed over it. Like I said, it's more the insertion of a vowel
that isn't there that gets me.

Incidentally, the way I generate Fincaiyan vocab is usually to take the
French, English, or Japanese word and "borrow" it according to various
rules. However, the Fincaiyans have no real "borrowed" vocabulary, since
they're a very agricultural society. And fantasy-fictional...

>
> >
> > -Keith
>
> Fancy that, an American named Keith. Strikes me as very odd, but stranger
> things have happened. For all I know, it might be as common as John over
> there.
As I say about my name: it's common enough that people recognize it as a
"normal" name, but it's uncommon enough that there aren't a whole lot of us.

In America, from my experiences (and I tend to note out people who have my
same first name, for obvious reasons), it's fairly uncommon. On occasion,
you'll find someone with it as a name, but not really much more common than
say "Lawrence" or "Trevor". Nowhere as common as "John" or "Matt".

...what strikes you about it as odd? Is it more/less common somewhere else
in the world? I will admit to having been educated as pretty much
America-centric (thanks to our wonderful public school system), so I have a
fairly high level of ignorance about the rest of the world (not as much as
many of my peers, though). Care to enlighten me?

-Keith, who finds duplicating his name to be silly in its own way, but still
insists on using his signature

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