Re: aranold

Looking for a place to attach my comment.

The World Service of the BBC broadcasts mostly USA news where I hear
it, on public radio stations starting at 11PM or midnight. For months
and months it has been pronouncing the candidate's name as BEARick
Obama, like the singular of the word barracks, where soldiers live,
first syllable like a bear who lives in the woods.

I found it amazing, in a world with television and radio and
telephone, that they assumed the pronunciation of his name based
apparently on its spelling, and ignored how he and all Americans
pronounced it.

Only since the election have they been, gradually it seems, changing
to using his own pronunciation.

Why not call her Queen ElizABETH, with the stress on ABETH? Because
she doesn't say it that way.

More to follow.

On Tue, 27 Jan 2009 04:34:22 +0000 (UTC), "meir b."
<meir251@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
And for those who know New York: if you need directions to
Houston Street in lower Manhattan, you'd better pronounce it "house-
ton," or you're likely to get a blank stare. Poor English teaching?
No. The early immigrants who lived there pronounced it as they saw
it.

Are you saying the original pronunciation of the street name was that
of Sam Houston? And that the immigrants managed to change an
established pronunciation?

What about Goethe in Chicago, pronounced GO thee (th as in thistle)?
(And I keep thinking there is one other in Chicago.)

The same dynamic is what leads there to be a street in Jerusalem
named Linkolen, named for the sixteenth U.S. president.

I see an argument for leaving out the second lamed, but all in all I
think it is better to keep it. That way Israelis will have less
trouble spelling his hame even if they have a lot more trouble saying
it as Americans or maybe all English speakers do.

OTOH, in Spanish, they'll respell the whole name so that when
pronunced according to simple Spanish rules, it sounds like what it
did in the original language. Hence, Chaim becomes Jaim, I think, or
maybe in practice Jaime. Then later when Cubans move to the US, there
is a tendency I think to call themselve Jaimie, with an English J.

I feel that the criticism of the Israeli pronunciation is no more
nor less than linguistic chauvinism.

Mei
.

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