Re: CHAT: The [+foreign] attribute

On Tue, 17 Sep 2002 13:20:51 +0200, daniel andreasson
<danielandreasson@...> wrote:

>John Cowan wrote:
>
>> This leads to a riddle on which I even trapped a native
>> Kentuckian: "How do you pronounce the capital of Kentucky,
>> ['luIsvIl] or ['luwivIl]?" People (especially Kentuckians)
>> are so quick to say it's (normatively) ['luwivIl] that they
>> are crushed by the reply, "No, it is pronounced [fr&Nkfr\=t]."
>
>:) We have a similar joke in Sweden.
>
>"How do you pronounce 'ananas' in English, ['&n@n@s] or
>[@'n&n@s]?"
>
>Now, most people reply ['&n@n@s] when of course it's rather
>more like ['paIn,&pl=]. :)
>
>||| daniel
Technically, there _is_ an English pronunciation of "ananas"; it's the
pronunciation that English-speaking botanists use when saying the
scientific name of the pineapple genus. (Since I don't know any botanists,
I don't know what that pronunciation might be.) Scientific names in English
have their own English pronunciations, although like any English words,
some of them have more than one acceptable version. Vowels can be either
long or short, but they're pronounced like _English_ long and short vowels
for the most part; the written diphthongs {ae} and {oe} are pronounced /i/.
Stress tends to fall on the next to last syllable if it's long (which isn't
always obvious from the spelling) or the third syllable from the end if the
next to last syllable is short.

My own langs have their own rules for pronouncing "Latin" names. Jarda
simply has a standard pronunciation for each letter of the Latin alphabet,
ignoring {h} and pronouncing {q} exactly like {k}. So for instance,
_Thryomanes_ (which is [Tr\aI"Am@ni:z] in English) is ["tryomanes] in
Jarda, ["txr1OmanEs] in Tirelat. _Carduelis_ is ["carduelis] in Jarda, with
a palatal [c], but Tirelat uses [k] before back vowels and [t_s] before
front vowels for Latin {c}: ["karduElis].

(And I can confirm the pronunciation of /"lu@vl=/. That sounds more or less
like what I heard growing up in Kentucky back in the 70's.)

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