Ok. I’m going to try to move some ‘comments’ to a new venue.
Linguistics
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chakaal
December 27th, 2009 at 10:15 am · Reply · Edit
I’m just wondering what the intended pronunciation is of “Reseune” and is Ariane pronounced “Arianna” or “Ari-Ann.”
Ary-ann and Rez-YUNE
CJ
December 27th, 2009 at 11:37 am · Reply · Edit
It’s AR-ee-ann and Rez-YUNE.
chakaal
December 27th, 2009 at 2:07 pm · Reply · Edit
Thank You. It’s been bugging me for YEARS!
Is it then a somewhat anglicized version of the French /rEz-9n/ – X-sampa or would you say it’s more like the vowel sound in good?
And is it Giraud (GEAR-ODD) or Giraud (/ZiRo/) – and Denys (Dennis) or Denys (De-NEE).
I’ve always tried to pronounce them mentally in French, being a French speaker.
ZHe-RAHrD. (The extra r is a peculiarity: the name is traditional, the pronunciation is transferred, which is where the r came from.) And it’s Dennis.
Sandor
December 27th, 2009 at 7:50 pm · Reply · Edit
It’s amazing how long one can go mispronouncing words in your head that you’ve never heard spoken aloud.
As a child, I was far ahead of the curve on reading level, so often came across words never spoken aloud in grade school. One still stands out in my mind (although I have no idea why noone ever used the word at school): misled. I went years pronouncing it my-zuld with a long “i” instead of mis-led. I had the correct meaning from context (which is how we learn definitions of all our common language elements), but never got the pronunciation until years later.
Go figure…
– S
AbigailM
December 27th, 2009 at 10:20 pm · Reply · Edit
Sandor, I had to smile at you “misled” story. In just the same way, I thought that awry (uh-RYE) was pronounced AWE-ree.
Many years ago someone in our family or known to them (I don’t know the details) was confused about the words mislaid and misled, and also the pronunciation of misled. So it has come to be a family idiom — if something is lost, it is “mizzuld” (short i, in our version).
philospher77
December 27th, 2009 at 11:39 pm · Reply · Edit
Hah! I remember when I was reading aloud in school and came across a new word that I had never heard or seen before. Thankfully, I knew the root word , leading me to call it “the Great Missouri Com-promise”. What can I say? I knew how to pronounce “promise”… why would putting “com” in front of it change things?
Hah! One of my childhood friends was so depressed when he learned that the name of The Hobbit was not “Bill-uh-doo.”
CJ
December 28th, 2009 at 1:47 pm · Reply · Edit
More than one young scholar has foundered on Missouri. In comics, of course, every letter is capped and the word breaks aren’t precise: I struggled with miss-our-I, trying to make it 3 words, and Illy–no-is, having no clue what that was.
tulrose
December 28th, 2009 at 3:14 pm · Reply · Edit
OK, now try being brought up on Parramatta and Wollongong. And Tallangatta and Coolangatta are NOT pronounced at all alike.
CJ
December 28th, 2009 at 3:50 pm · Reply · Edit
philospher77
December 29th, 2009 at 9:29 am · Reply · Edit
I was born and raised in Missouri,and it is three syllables. The big debate there is whether it is Miz-er-E, or Miz-er-uh. The majority of the people I knew went with the “ee” ending, but in that case you HAVE to put the emphasis on the second syllable, so that it is mi-ZUR-ee, not “misery”. Isn’t English fun!
Spiderdavon
December 28th, 2009 at 12:51 pm · Reply · Edit
At junior school I had a few weeks off sick and when I got back I found they’d covered weights and measures (that’s Imperial, not metric) in my absence. How was I to know that cwt wasn’t pronounced “cute”……
(For the metric among us that’s the abbreviation for a hundredweight)
CJ
December 28th, 2009 at 3:51 pm · Reply · Edit
I always wondered what cwt was, and never found the occasion to look it up.
Hanneke
December 29th, 2009 at 9:20 am · Reply · Edit
There was a joke about English spelling, when I was in secondary school: How would you pronounce ‘ghoti’ if it was an English word? The answer was ‘fish’ (gh from enough, o from women, ti from nation).
I’d guess I’m not sure how to pronounce almost two-thirds of the English words I ‘know’ from my reading, which makes speaking it a lot more uncertain than reading it, even though I liked watching/listening to the BBC. There are a great many words that one reads in books that are never used in daily life! It’s funny and rather heartening to read here that even native-speakers sometimes stumble.
philospher77
December 29th, 2009 at 9:35 am · Reply · Edit
I am an extremely well-read person, with an admittedly huge vocabulary, and CJ managed to sneak a new word in on me. I was rather impressed… it’s not at all common for me to come across something I don’t know already. That was the word “recreant”, used to describe Tristen’s Owl in many of the Fortress books. Thankfully, I did know miscreant, and assumed that the base was the same, so the meaning was probably similar. But it was one of the few times I have had to go look something up in a long time to be sure.
Spiderdavon
December 29th, 2009 at 11:35 am · Reply · Edit
Hanneke – given the appalling state of the British educational system, that one-third of words you do know probably exceeds the total vocabulary of the average British kid!!
HRHSpence
December 29th, 2009 at 11:48 am · Reply · Edit
I remember two distinct words from my High school days, having learned the one from hearing and the other from seeing. I recognized but mispronounced facade as fah KADE from my reading, but had no clue how to spell fuh SAHD.
CJ
December 29th, 2009 at 12:25 pm · Reply · Edit
Well, and equivalent to the difficulty of Australian place names—there’s Tonkawa, Chilicothe, Miami, (the Oklahoma town is Mi-AM-uh instead of Mi-AM-ee), Sapulpa, Muskogee, Connecticut, Snowhomish…
Half the phone sales people in the US can’t pronounce Spokane. (spo-CAN).
But then my genealogy research leads me back to the Netherlands, where I never can remember if there is or isn’t a second -e in Overjyssl.
chondrite
December 29th, 2009 at 3:46 pm · Reply · Edit
I will see your Australian and Native American names (I grew up in the midwest, so things like Tuscarawas, Tonawanda, and Gnadenhutten aren’t unknown), and raise you Kaaawa, Aiea, Kaupo, and Kalaniana’ole!
Hanneke
December 30th, 2009 at 3:25 am · Reply · Edit
It’s Overijssel, actually: the province over (across) the river IJssel (the ‘long y’, with dots on, is considered one letter, in Dutch, so both halves get capitalized).
Dutch has a bit of the opposite difficulty of English: it uses several different letters or diphthongs to write the same sound – if you can read it (and know the way the Dutch pronounce the letters) you generally know how it sounds, but you can’t always guess how it will be written when you hear it. I can’t think of an English equivalent for the sound of the letter(diphthong) -ij-, which can also be written as -ei-(it’s a bit like saying May while opening your lower jaw a bit more); but it’s different from the sound of what we call the greek y (in Dutch that one sounds the same as dutch -ie- or English long -ee-). So the difference between y and ij, which is so confusing for everybody else, generally doesn’t trouble the kids here much – instead they confuse ij en ei.
Sorry, taking off my teaching hat now.
CJ
December 30th, 2009 at 8:29 am · Reply · Edit
Lol: maybe now I’ll remember it. IJssel! It’s like Latin AEsop.
AbigailM
December 30th, 2009 at 8:03 am · Reply · Edit
Nobody has mentioned Welsh yet . . .
Penrhyndeudraeth, the town where much of The Prisoner was filmed, for instance (and no, I don’t know how to say it.)
CJ
December 30th, 2009 at 8:37 am · Reply · Edit
And Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. If you’ve seen Barbarella, you recall this was the Resistance codeword. I think it was constructed and legally registered as a bit of a linguistic stunt, but it is a place name in Wales.
And no, I didn’t remember that off the top of my head: I had to look it up and swipe it.
For Faery Moon, I had to learn a bit of Celtic, and got quite used to the spelling, but some languages take a bit of eye-adjustment to learn to group the sounds….
Actually, the question about Celtic spelling has made me wonder: why do we keep such odd-to-us spellings when we borrow words, instead of just going with a more-or-less phonetic spelling? Why go with Sean instead of Shaun/Shawn, or Sidhe instead of Shee? I can see using the Celtic spellings if I were actually speaking the language, and I will admit that it adds a certain air of exoticness to the story to use the authentic spelling, but it sure does make it harder to remember how to pronounce things! Especially when we have no qualms with actually renaming things to suit our language, like calling a certain European country “Germany” instead of “Deutschland”, or the fact that most people call a certain city Cologne, which is the French pronunciation, instead of the much more proper Koeln (that should be an o with an ulaut, but I don’t know how to make that). So what are the rules on this sort of thing?
If you look to certain German – or; Tyskland, as we name it in Sweden, which, btw, is called Sverige by those of us living there 😉 – place names those can be explained by the area having been part of either France (“Frankrike”, for us Swedes) or Germany in times past. Elsass/Alsace is an example of this. Not uncommon in Europe, in certain areas road signs are bilingual. On Corsica, for example.
Anyway, the phonetic method is frequently used as well. In Sweden we call tape “tejp”, and if you look at our language you can tell when we “adopted” a word by it’s heritage – during the Hansa years they are ‘german’, then it was ‘french’, then ‘german’ again, and now they’re ‘english’; often skewed beyond recognition. Sometimes if becomes real fun, like with ‘snälltåg’; it’s from the german Schnellzug, meaning “fast train” but where “schnell” = “fast” “snäll” = “kind” 😉
When I was very young my uncle worked for Halliburton oilfield equipment company—and he used to clip all the stamps for me off letters the company got: plus he gave me a big mesh bag of random stamps he’d bought from a dealer—in 1948 they included many countries no longer independent. I learned the names of countries from that, and a few words of various languages. It opened up the world to me, because I had a little world globe, and I’d look up the places. I knew where, for instance, Bosnia-Herzegovina was, and I had stamps from Austria-Hungary, and just all sorts, that taught me political history as well, because not all my stamps matched the then-modern maps.
My own studies were in the Mediterranean languages: I had a semester of Scientific German, but never learned to pronounce it—I never mastered the complex sounds. I love the notations on Nordic languages, and John Dalmas, a writer friend of mine, has attempted to teach me phrases in Swedish…but I think the rascal picks hard ones. He never agrees that I’ve said it right. 😆
We are an amalgam of a language: I suspect that many borrowers had no idea how to convert, or that the scholars refused to convert it. So we simply tack on rules. Myself, I go with the Celtic spellings because they’re prettier, at least to my eye.
As a sample of names transliterated by non-scholars, conversions applied by early settlers to Indian place names are not in general typographically elegant. Too many w, oo’s and ee’s, at least to my eye. I’d rather have a more Latinic spelling. And I’d like to see a movement to give the great chiefs their names too: Setanta and Setanka…very poetic. Though Navajo names might be a wee bit harder. You have to ask Jane about the Indian language families: she’s up on who’s Athabascan (I think that’s the northeast and clear across the plains, but I’m not sure) and who’s something else. (I’m on the board of the Endangered Language Fund, which is struggling to preserve languages which are losing speakers, throughout the world: American Indian languages are among those in serious, serious danger.)
We do use the -shee form in banshee (it was originally bain sidhe, the White Sidhe). But not elsewhere that I can think of.
We’ve made some changes: Beijing instead of Peking; Mumbai instead of Bombay. Not to mention the way we handle Chinese personal names. But it takes some getting used to.
I do think we’re savvy enough to have announcers at the Olympic games give athletes’ names in their proper order.
Athabascan = Navajo and Apache in the American Southwest; and a bunch of languages up north (in Canada and Alaska).
Even when scholars come up with a system for writing language X in Latin script, they don’t necessarily agree on just *one* system. Peking and Beijing are just two different systems’ spelling of the same word; Peking = Wade-Giles system, developed by 19th century Western scholars; Beijing = Pinyin system, developed by the Red Chinese government.
But who am I to talk. I speak one language, am missing a vowel or two from that one… and “Jaxartes” is the Greek name of a river in Kazakhstan.
Have you ever read Bank’s Feersum Enjin? All phonetic, and very hard going. Personally I like the Celtic spelling, despite the less-than-obvious pronunciation. It looks more exotic and promotes an other-wordly sort of feeling.
Does everyone know Ladle Rat Rotten Hut? http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/anguish.html#Ladle%20Rat%20Rotten%20Hut
Not exactly phonetic 😉 Read it aloud, pronouncing every word in its normal way despite it making no sense, and you will begin to hear a familiar tale.
Phonetic spelling also depends on the native language of the writer. When I was a kid we moved to Australia for a year. My little sister was 6, she’d just learned to write her alphabet, and so was sure she could write English just as easily as Dutch. And she did, phonetically – but it was only readable for us who knew the dutch pronounciation of the letters. If you read it aloud as if it was Dutch, an English sentence appears; but to English-language eyes it was just gibberish.
Some of the phonetic transcriptions of the native american names may suffer from a similar translation-problem, as not all of the settlers were born English speakers.
I agree with SpiderDavon: reading phonetic spelling is slow going, as you have to ‘sound out’ each letter in your head to get the meaning. Fast reading depends on recognising the ‘image’ of whole words or syllables, and that recognition is disrupted by the changed spelling. So changing the spelling to conform to the pronounciation is always a lot of trouble for everybody who has already learned to read and write, as well as throwing overboard all the interesting historical bagage that Busifer mentions. Even though it makes learning English more difficult, I’m rather glad that they’ve mostly kept the historically grown spellings.
Even though I have no idea how to pronounce all those exotic Welsh names and such they do give a flavour of a certain culture and location to a story. I’ve looked up the rules several times but when I’m reading and deep in a story they refuse to stick in my mind, and I just sound those names out as if they were written in Dutch (except shee for sidhe, that one’s short enough to be remembered, and some of the Irish/Welsh personal names). I’m not likely to ever have to talk about them by name so who cares that it’s the wrong way to say them? But the added flavour to the story is good!
Many indian place names in this area are more codified now, but read old maps and there are some odd phonetic spelling. Could this have been due to? a.) a loose attitude in general about spelling. b.) the accent and clarity of the speaker. Speech impediments can’t be a new thing. Where I live Shumankanuc was originally, as one of many spellings, Chemunganook……and you should hear the way speakers mangle these……..Occupustuxet is a favorite.
What an early Texas settler or a cowboy could do to French is a hoot. In our county, there is a new state park named for Isle de Bois Creek. Current residents mangle it considerably, but I keep lobbying for pronunciation the way my mother told me county residents did a century ago -“Zilly Boy.”
And then there’s the Purgatoire Valley in Colorado – the coyboy version, I’m told, was the “Picket-Wire.”
Happy New Year, all.
Or the southern bois d’ arc (bow-wood) tree, which is pronounced, and often spelled, as bodark. It’s also known as the Osage Orange.
Coeur d’Alene ID (I used to live on Coeur d’Alene St in Spokane) is usually rendered as CDA in Spokane since a lot of people can’t spell it. It means Heart of an Awl (from the teardrop (roughly) shape of Coeur d’Alene lake—and is one of the prettiest views in the NW—not to mention a nice resort casino at the end of it. It’s south of Lake Pend Oreille—Hanging Ear–Or ear-hanging (shell earrings)–pronounced Ponderay, another beautiful lake. There are Native American tribes bearing the same names.
Down here in Southeastern VA we have the “Powhite” parkway, Matoaka and Monticello side by side with Lafayette and Richmond and York. The traffic lady on the radio says “Pow-hite” but I’m not at all sure she’s right. Matoaka was the actual personal name of the girl Pocahontas – “Playful One”, and was not used by the British. Lots of interesting place names down here of all origins – “Toe Ink Wayside” …???
Ooo! Placenames!
We have a wonderful crop of good old Celtic/Anglo-Saxon/Norman villages near here. Stanton Drew, Bishop Sutton, Temple Cloud, Chew Magna, Compton Dando, Stanton Wick, Norton Fitzwarren, and my absolute favourite, Nempnett Thrubwell. That last is a Celtic/Old English name, and has a “Fairy Toot” (neolithic mound). Stanton Drew is another Celtic/Old English name, and has the second largest stone circle in Britain.
Quaint, and I love Nempnett Thrubwell! We used to live within driving distance of the poetically named Toadsuck and Pickle’s Gap, Arkansas, and Bucksnort—although Bucksnort was a bit of a drive further—I think in Tennessee. The major industry seems to be t-shirts sporting “I’ve been to_____”!
See your Toadsuck and raise you a Scratchy Bottom (in Dorset, near Durdle Door)
Ha! How about the poetic “Squaw Turd Mountain” (probably recently changed to Native American Woman Turd Mountain, it just don’t sing the same), not far from (I’m not kidding) “Horse Shittum Springs”? Just look in the Pahrump quadrangle in southern Nevada. Or, closer to my current Idaho home, “Whoopemup Creek” (’cause you had to “whoop up” or whip up the horses to make the neaby upgrade in the trail). Or, ‘swelp me, Dickshooter Ridge.
Jeff