Re: Mispronouncing Conlang Names

On Wednesday, April 13, 2005, at 10:11 , Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:

> David J. Peterson skrev:
[snip]
>> (1) Sohlob: Seen it a lot, and, again, because I like that coda [h],
>> I tend to pronounce it ['soh.lob]--pretty much just like it looks.
>
> Yes pretty much, tho it's actually [sQ'KQb_0].
..with _hl_ used as in Zulu & Xhosa orthography   :)
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On Wednesday, April 13, 2005, at 05:54 , Roger Mills wrote:

> Amusing thread. Most of the (mis)pronunciations have occurred to me at one
> time or another.
Some are almost inevitable. If one puts a circumflex above _i_ it is going
to suggest that thing is a vowel - indeed, to those of us who know some
Welsh (or Tolkien), it suggests a _long_ vowel    :)

> Accustomed to pronouncing -h in Indonesian, I tend to do the same when it
> occurs in ...VhC...; so
> Sohlob > ['soh.lob]
> Teonaht > ['teonaht] until I heard Sally pronounce it in her long-ago
> radio
> interview.......
Reasonable IMO - tho |hl| = [K] does have natlang precedent (see above);
but AFAIK |ht| = [T] has no such precedent and is peculiar to Teonaht
[not meant as a criticism, only as an observation].

> Brithenig was ['brIT@nig] at first, then [brI'Tenig] with a strong
> tendency
> to devoice that final /g/; now the horse's mouth (apologies to Andrew)
> tells
> us it's [...'nig]...but why?
Presumably for the same reason that French _brittanique_ has slight
emphasis on the final syllable, I guess - i.e. analogy. When the Latin
endings got dropped, the stress would normally fall on the final syllable.

> wouldn't it have derived from [bri'tan.nicus]
> or some such???
Must be _some such_, as _th_ /T/ will have derived from -tt-. I had
assumed it was, like the modern Welsh & Breton words, from *Brittonico- ,
but the _e_ in the middle is odd. I guess it is from a supposed hybrid of
Latin Britannic- and Old British Brittonic-, namely Brittan(n)ic-

One of the names that got mispronounced was the now discarded abbreviation
for 'briefscript', i.e. BrSc  :)

I discarded it as (a) it's awkward to type, (b) it was mispronounced in
several different ways, and (c) someone quite rightly took me to task for
using an abbreviation.

The language is now called Bax (or more properly ~bax, where ~ denotes a
proper name). Some may recall that in Bax it is actually pronounced
/pi'aCi/. I had toyed with the idea of giving it a 'natlang' form of the
name, such as *Piashi. But I have decided against that.

The name will be written Bax in English, French, German etc etc.  It will
be pronounced /b&ks/ in English, /baks/ in French and, I guess, /ba:ks/ in
German etc, etc. Thus, you write the name as Bax and pronounce it
according to your L1; only in Bax itself is it written ~bax and pronounced
/pi'aCi/

Bax - the name you won't mispronounce   :-)

PS - the server at my ISP seems to be denying access to the Bax section at
the moment - I'll try to sort it out as soon as possible :=(

Ray
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ray.brown@freeuk.com
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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