Re: new Klingon spelling
| From: | dansulani <dansulani@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, January 6, 2004, 9:45 |
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On 5 Jan, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
> From: Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
> > Quoting Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>:
> > > In college, i remember seeing an anti-war protest where the protesters
> > > were chanting slogans like "no war in EYE-RACK!". It took a Lot of
> > > self-control to not go over and say "yo, if you care so much about
> > > [3IrA:q], at least TRY to say their name properly!"
> >
<snip>
> In the case of Iraq, the quality of the two vowels had no original
> basis in the pronunciation of the foreign tongue; they were simply
> guessed at through the medium of writing. That is, the English
> speakers' ignorance of Arabic lead them to arbitrarily assign
> values based not on anything to do with their internal grammar of
> English, but with the social conventions associated with English
> orthography. Thus, there is a real sense in which some toponyms
> have natural deviations from their source, and others which are
> *unnatural* deviations from their source.
How then would the people who pronounce | Iraq | with an initial [aj]
pronounce | Islam | ? I have never heard [ajsl&m], [ajslam], [ajzl&m],
or any other version beginning with [aj]! Why would there be
a difference between the two words? One should think that the
English speakers would have the same ignorance of Arabic in each case.
(Or maybe people do pronounce it that way and I have just never heard it?)
Dan Sulani
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likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a.
A word is an awesome thing.
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