Re: new Klingon spelling

On Sun, 4 Jan 2004, Axiem wrote:

> Some people said:
>
> > 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.

> 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).

> </ranty flamebait>
>
> -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.

--
Tristan

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