Re: new Klingon spelling

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!"
>
> A case could be made that /ajr&k/ is a perfectly legimate English name
> of the place; I suppose you're not wanting "France" pronounced [fRãs]?
and Padraic wrote:
> This is just Americans pronouncing the name in
> good American English. Frankly, I've heard
> Hussein say "America" in Arabic enough times to
> know he's not saying it like an American would.
> Frankly, I don't care - he speaks Arabic and can
> jolly well say "America" however it fits his
> phonology and accentuation systems. We should not
> be expected to do more with /ajr&k/.
I think there's a difference, though, between toponyms like
"France" or "Rome" and those like Iraq in that the main reason
the former sound different from the indigenous terms is centuries of
sound-change that have occurred altering what was originally a very
close rendering of the sounds in the other languages.  "France" was
borrowed from French when the [n] had not entirely disappeared in
French, and the [r] was a apical trill in French as it was in late Old
English.  Both English and French have changed in the meantime.

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.

(Personally, aside from these issues, I find it disrespectful
not to make an effort to pronounce the latter category of terms
as it would be in the source language.  It's not "wrong", except
insofar as it is "wrong" not to take into consideration other
people's cultures as valid just as your own.  I find anglophones
to be very insular in this respect.)

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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