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

--- Tristan Mc Leay <kesuari@...> wrote:
>
> French journos aren't illiterate. They're just
> French.
Perhaps "illiterate" isn't the right term. But I very
much would like somebody to explain me why, even after
having spent some weeks, on months, on the spot, a
French reporter or journalist is unable to pronounce
'Srebrenica' or 'Ludwigshafen' or whatever looking a
little bit exotic. And why the most respected French
newspaper, "Le Monde", is unable to write correctly
"Vesteraalen" (I also write it uncorrectly here, but I
know it, and I'm not "Le Monde") in a big title for a
full page article about... Vesteraalen Islands.

In France, there is a real culture of "we pronounce
the right way, foreigners don't". The mere idea of
something like a stress (accent tonique) not working
like in French seems to us utterly ridiculous.
Somebody trying to stress a foreign word like a native
will almost surely raise laughter and sarcasm around.

I believe journalists, or reporters, working on
international themes should know something about local
pronunciation, or at least learn it while they work on
it. French ones will never learn. "They have ears and
they don't hear". And of course, if they pronounce
Srebrenica like they do on TV news, millions of French
people will think "oh, he must know, that's the way it
should be pronounced".

People sometimes tell me that my English pronunciation
is good. Why is it so ? Because I didn't learn English
at school (I was learning German at the time), but
with tapes recorded by English natives. What's funny
is that even the French pronouncing English the
"French" way sometimes tell me that, so that means
that they know that their pronunciation is not too
good, and they have an idea of how it should be, but
they just feel sort of ashamed of pronouncing
not-the-French-way. There is a national psychological
problem in there, that's for sure.

(Also typical, the fact that, once they have learned
some English, French people assume that all other
languages in the world should more or less conform to
the same rules. In fact, they seem to think that there
are two kinds of people in the world: the French, and
the others. That's why they will pronounce the German
"w" just like the English, since both Germans and
English are foreigners. There is an expression about
that: "il parle en étranger" (he's talking foreign).
Everything that is not French is foreign, and further
distinctions are of little interest.)



=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)


		
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