Re: How to Make Chicken Cacciatore (was: phonetics by guesswork)

Thomas R. Wier wrote:
> Christian wrote:
>
>>--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Tristan Mc Leay <kesuari@Y...> wrote:
>>
>>>Christian Thalmann wrote:
>>>
>>>>Frankly, the obstinate American opinion that "them
>>>>pesky accents can't possibly be important, because
>>>>otherwise we'd have them too" strikes me as arrogant.
>>>
>>>It's not an 'obstinate American opinion'. Frankly, I'm offended that you
>>>seem to think all Englishers are American; I thought you were smarter
>>>than that
>>
>>Granted, it's a blanket statement and not very well
>>researched.  ;-)  I just get the feeling that Americans
>>tend to be less in touch with the rest of the linguistic
>>world than, say, the British.  I doubt that the latter
>>treat umlauts any differently, though.
>
>
> So, do you actually *read* many American and British publications
> (i.e., not just usenet)?  I ask, because I do read periodicals like the
> New York Times and the Guardian and the Sydney Morning Herald on
> a daily basis, and I find them all to be more or less consistently
> inconsistent in the use of foreign accents.  I've found if anything,
> the NYT is *more* likely to use foreign accents than these other
> publications because the NYT takes itself far, far more seriously
> than most British and other anglophone publications (not entirely
> without reason).
Indeed. Guantanamo Bay is quite often in the Australian news, but the
first time I read a NYT article on the topic, I was quite suprised to
see 'Guantánamo Bay' (we get the stress right in pronunciation
though---it's more-or-less consistently /gwan'tanamVu/, with the
exception of the third /a/ which alternates between [a] and [@] and
probably only ever gets [a] because of the preceeding two vowels).

(Incidentally, using á in 'Guantanamo Bay' seems wrong to me, the word
is pronounced Englishly without a hint of foreignness (with the
exception that no native word looks/sounds like it), and the second word
is English too, so it's clearly a nativised word that just happens to
have retained its spelling... But maybe it's just that I'd never seen it
with one till a few weeks ago...)

--
| Tristan.               |       To be nobody-but-yourself in a world
| kesuari@yahoo!.com.au  |  which is doing its best to, night and day,
|                        |                 to make you everybody else---
|                        |          means to fight the hardest battle
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|                        |                    and never stop fighting.
|                        |      --- E. E. Cummings, "A Miscellany"
|                        |
|                        |     In the fight between you and the world,
|                        |                             back the world.
|                        |      --- Franz Kafka,
|                        |         "RS's 1974 Expectation of Days"